U.S. President Donald Trump defended his decision to give billionaire businessman Elon Musk a major role in his administration as head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) amid backlash over the freezing of funding for USAID, which affected foreign assistance programs around the world.
Trump curtailed the U.S. Agency for International Development work when he ordered a 90-day spending freeze on January 24. The decision affected numerous businesses and nonprofit groups in Ukraine, which are now struggling to cope. It also affected aid programs for people in Afghanistan.
Trump and Musk touched on the move during their first joint TV interview, which aired on February 18 on Fox News, a conservative U.S. news outlet. Trump said he took the step to freeze USAID’s funding because his predecessor, President Joe Biden, overspent, including on foreign aid that he said did not serve U.S. interests, and widened the deficit.
Since 2022, USAID has provided Ukraine with billions of dollars in humanitarian aid, development assistance, and direct budget support. Musk and Trump were not asked about the suspension of aid to the programs in Ukraine during the interview or Trump’s diplomatic efforts to end the war in Ukraine.
The interview focused more on Trump’s relationship with Musk, the world’s richest man, and why he chose him to head DOGE.
“I know a lot of businessmen and they are not necessarily good people,” Trump said. Musk is a great person who “wants to see the country do well,” Trump told Fox News interviewer Sean Hannity, who is a friend of the president.
DOGE has been rooting out government waste, fraud, and abuse, Trump said, and has already saved American taxpayers millions of dollars.
Since Trump returned to office on January 20, DOGE has gone from department to department, laying off or firing thousands of government employees in a major shakeup of the federal government designed to cut costs and shrink its size. A list of programs that have been identified, some costing hundreds of millions of dollars, scrolled on the screen during the joint interview.
Musk said he took the role to reduce the bureaucracy and prevent the United States from going bankrupt.
“The goal is to try to get a trillion dollars out of the deficit,” Musk said, claiming that Trump “was handed a two-trillion deficit when he came to office.”
Musk said the average American taxpayer should be “mad as hell” over the way their tax dollars have been spent.
He said some of the people on his DOGE team, which has come under withering criticism from Democrats for taking what they say is illegal actions as it slashes programs, are federal employees. Others are software engineers who could be earning million-dollar salaries but have instead opted to work for him.
The president said Musk has only been implementing his executive orders, and vowed that traditional programs such as Social Security and the government-funded health insurance programs Medicare and Medicaid “won’t be touched” by the cuts.
However, the arrival of DOGE employees this week at the Social Security Administration prompted the abrupt resignation of its chief over an apparent clash with Musk’s cost-cutting team. Other senior federal officials have resigned when confronted with DOGE’s scorched-earth approach to federal spending.
Trump also said that Musk has not asked him for any favors for his companies — namely SpaceX, which holds multiple contracts with the U.S. government, and Tesla, which has benefited from U.S. subsidies to promote electric vehicles.
Musk said he would recuse himself if he’s ever confronted with a situation involving his businesses, and Trump said, “If there’s ever a conflict, he won’t be involved.”
Musk told Hannity he has paid a price for his support for Trump but intends to continue.
“I’m a technologist and I try to make technologies that help people and improve the world,” said Musk, who wore a sport coat over a T-shirt with the words Tech Support across the front.
Trump said he has always respected Musk, but his admiration for him grew when he opened the use of Starlink communications satellites to people in North Carolina whose communities had been devastated by a hurricane last year.
His admiration only grew when SpaceX was able to return a rocket to Earth and be grasped out of the air “like a beautiful little baby,” and he decided he wanted him on his team.
Arden Badon
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