Imagine your boss asks you to put together a survey, a simple affair of just a few questions, filling no more than one side of a single sheet of paper. You whip it up within a few hours, your boss approves it and you’re done. That’s not the way things are done in the Federal Government.

During Fox’s Brett Baier’s recent interview of Elon Musk and several of the very impressive CEOs and titans of business working for DOGE—available here--one held up just such a survey and explained he discovered government paid nearly a billion dollars to produce it.

Graphic: Fox/X Screenshot

The interview was an impressive display of talent, six men with at least one billionaire, and the rest successful professionals, including one who runs multiple productive businesses. All took time away from their careers to help save America, which hope they eloquently expressed.

Democrats portray DOGE and its employees as rapacious monsters enriching themselves while stealing American’s personal data for nefarious purposes. Pimply-faced children without a clue, destroying “our democracy.” What viewers saw was mature, serious patriots aligned with Elon Musk’s goal of saving America from financial ruin while operating entirely within the law unlike so many of those they’re investigating.  

Joe Gebbia, the billionaire co-founder of Airbnb spoke of reforming the underground mine in Pennsylvania that has, in 22,000 filing cabinets, every paper document for every past and future retired government employee. The glacial process hasn’t been modernized in 70 years. He’s going to digitize it all, and fast.

Steve Davis, a top SpaceX employee, has dug into Social Security:

Among DOGE’s discoveries are 15 million people aged over 120 marked as “alive” in the Social Security system. “Social Security numbers that were clearly fraudulent were floating around that can be used only for bad intentions.” There also are 4.6 million credit cards in the federal government for some 2.4 million ­employees.

A Silicon Valley CEO, Tom Krause, found only a single bank account used to disburse all monies from the government, and is working to bring private business operating and accountability standards to the federal government.

“There’s $500 billion of fraud every year and hundreds of billions of improper payments and we can’t pass an audit,” he said. “We’re serving 580-plus agencies and up until very recently, effectively they could say ‘make the payment’ and Treasury just sent it out as fast as possible, no verification.”

It's other people's money, so why not? Aram Moghaddassi is a software engineer for one of Musk’s companies. He was shocked to discover that 40% of all phone calls to the agency asking to change bank routing are fraudulent, depriving people who deserve Social Security of their payments. Now, those changes can only be made in person so identities can be verified.  He added: 

 "The first thing that got me really excited about DOGE was learning basically the state of government computers," Moghaddassi said. "By some estimates, government IT costs about $100 billion. Its funding systems are over 50 years old in the case of something like Social Security or the IRS. So really critical systems are old. They cost a lot of money to maintain, and the efforts to improve them are often very delayed. So I thought, I'm a software engineer that maybe could make a difference here."

Brad Smith is a Rhodes Scholar with Harvard and Oxford degrees and has health care expertise.  He discovered that there are 700 IT systems at the National Institutes of health that can’t speak with each other. Smith spoke of other bizarre discoveries: “They have 27 different CIOs." Baier interrupted to ask, "Twenty-seven different chief information officers?" Smith answered, "Correct." This is the kind of duplication and corruption no private business can afford.

Anthony Armstrong is embedded with the Office of Personnel Management. He discovered “1400 people at the IRS whose job is just to hand out laptops and cellphones to staff.”  Armstrong didn’t say so, but this is a purposeful recipe for fraud and theft.

Tyler Hassen runs five businesses in Houston.  At the Department of the Interior, he discovered “Under the Biden administration, there was no departmental oversight whatsoever.”  He’s the man that discovered the billion-dollar, one page survey, and managed to recover all but $75 million.

Many of them praised the federal employees with whom they’ve been working, portraying them as patriots who have struggled for years to enact the changes DOGE is making. All agreed, as Musk noted, their job is largely tech support, bringing stone age computer systems up to modern standards, which will go a very long way toward preventing fraud and dramatically improving efficiency and customer service.

Graphic: X Screenshot

Americans are already largely in favor of DOGE’s work. If the nation saw this interview, Americans would be overwhelmingly in favor.

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Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, life-long athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer and high school and college English teacher. He is a published author and blogger. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.