Former President Donald Trump announced on Thursday that he will establish a government efficiency commission and it will be headed by billionaire Elon Musk if he wins the Nov. 5 election.
Musk signaled on X that he is ready and willing to lead such a commission without pay or recognition.
“I look forward to serving America if the opportunity arises,” Musk posted. “No pay, no title, no recognition is needed.”
Trump laid out his economic vision Thursday morning during a speech at the Economic Club of New York in Manhattan.
“I will create a government efficiency commission tasked with conducting a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government and making recommendations for drastic reforms,” Trump stated, adding that Musk has already agreed to head the task force.
“In 2022 alone, fraud and improper payments alone cost taxpayers an estimated hundreds of billions of dollars. As the first order of business, this commission will develop an action plan to totally eliminate fraud and improper payments within six months,” Trump said, promising that the effort will “save trillions of dollars.”
Trump had reportedly been discussing the idea of a government efficiency commission with aides for weeks, but his speech today was the first time he had publicly aired the idea.
During a podcast on Aug. 19, Musk indicated that he had held conversations with Trump about the proposal and was interested in serving on the body.
Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, a union which represents about 750,000 federal workers “accused Trump and Musk of wanting to gut the non-partisan civil service and replace fired workers with allies,” according to Reuters.
“There’s nothing efficient about that,” Kelley wrote in a statement.
While the U.S. government already has the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) to investigate federal spending and performance, more needs to be done to stop the waste and abuse of taxpayer dollars such as the $280 billion in stolen COVID relief funding.
Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), Chairman of the House Oversight Committee, sent a letter to the Department of Justice in September of 2023, demanding answers after the regime failed to recover the the funds.
“It is highly concerning that possibly billions of taxpayer dollars intended to help Americans suffering the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic were stolen by organized criminal rings in foreign countries,” said Comer in his letter. “Therefore, we write today to better understand the full scope of this problem and what actions the Department has taken to investigate international COVID-19 relief program fraud and hold these foreign actors accountable.”
“As of January 2023, the federal government spent approximately $4.6 trillion on aid programs in response to the COVID-19 pandemic,” Comer continued. “This is equal to more than was spent by the entire federal government in every fiscal year prior to 2020.” He added that “estimates imply that at least half of all stolen COVID-19 relief funds went to Russian, Chinese, and Nigerian criminals.”
Instead of forming commissions to study the problems, a better first step would be to eliminate as many agencies as possible. Someone should ask Mr. Kelley to define the word “non-partisan” as every union in America supports Democrats. Public unions fund Democrats at multiples of funding Republicans. Eliminate public unions. That might put the two parties on equal footing where funding is concerned.
A government of limited and enumerated powers is a good rule of thumb for eliminating fraud, waste and overreach. Too many citizens neither read nor understand the Constitution.