Some Republicans Act As If Musk Is the First to Uncover Waste. He Isn’t.

The Washington Post

15:52 JST, March 9, 2025

Supporters of Elon Musk’s chain saw approach to slashing the federal government speak as if no one has ever uncovered wasteful spending as his underlings are haphazardly doing.

“No one has brought that before in the past. This is truly groundbreaking,” Rep. Andy Harris (R-Maryland) proclaimed to reporters Thursday.

Sen. John Hoeven seemed to be equally fascinated by Musk’s bid to enhance productivity. “Wow, what’s not to like about that,” the North Dakota Republican said.

And Rep. Randy Weber (R-Texas) divulged that he had read aloud a poem to the world’s richest man that included this stanza:

“He’s figured out what’s crazy wrong. We should have known it, all along.”

Weber and other supporters of Musk should not be surprised to learn what Musk’s team has found.

For more than 40 years, a constellation of interest groups, from across the political ideological spectrum, have been unearthing and exposing spending that many would consider odd, if not completely wasteful.

Founded in 1981, the Project on Government Oversight has spent most of its time trying to expose Pentagon cost overruns, including an early 1980s report on how it cost $436 for a hammer and $7,600 for a coffee maker. Citizens Against Government Waste published its first “Pig Book” in 1991, highlighting more than $4 billion worth of “pork barrel spending” Congress foisted upon the agencies.

And in 2000, Taxpayers for Common Sense picked up the “Golden Fleece” award from the mantle of former senator William Proxmire (D-Wisconsin), the godfather of the movement to expose government waste who created the fleecing award in 1975.

Musk is not even the first private businessman given exclusive access to the federal government books. In March 1982, President Ronald Reagan appointed J. Peter Grace, then the CEO of chemical conglomerate W.R. Grace, to run the Private Sector Survey on Cost Control in the Federal Government.

That two-year Grace Commission, funded almost entirely by private donations and staffed from outside the government, ended with $240 billion in savings in 10 years after some of its 2,478 recommendations were adopted, including the creation of a commission to close out-of-date military bases.

Today’s outside agitators trying to root out fraudulent spending welcome Musk to the fight, while noting that he isn’t inventing the wheel.

“When people say this is all new, I say, ‘This has been accumulating,’” Thomas A. Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste, said in an interview Friday.

Schatz said that Musk’s intangible is not his technologists forcing their way into agencies and plugging in their computers to have algorithms determine what’s wasteful. Instead, it is the attention that he can bring to an issue with a single social media post on his platform because ultimately most of these programs will require congressional action to trim their funding.

“That doesn’t eliminate the spending,” Schatz said of Musk’s tweets mocking spending, “but it does set in motion the process by which it can be done.”

The early efforts – which included layoffs to thousands of federal workers only to have several hired back into their critical jobs – have produced lots of confusion and irritated some Cabinet heads. Musk has made himself more unpopular with the broader public, undermining his intentions.

President Donald Trump sent more mixed signals Thursday by telling Cabinet members they had first rights on their agency layoffs but warning that if they do not make any moves, “then Elon will do the cutting.”

Democrats fear that their GOP colleagues are falling for Musk’s bluster because he speaks in technology terms that sound smart, yet these approaches would harm agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Programs we fund, whether it’s NIH, a public health system or CDC, are not a tech company. And you can’t just break them and say, ‘Well, let’s see if we can refix that,’” said Sen. Patty Murray (Washington), the most senior Democrat on the Appropriations Committee.

Sen. Mark R. Warner (D), who became a millionaire helping pioneer Northern Virginia’s tech corridor, said Musk could have used his background in technology and defense contracting to suggest major IT upgrades and a Pentagon overhaul.

“Suddenly identifying, by some 22-year-old, a line item without appropriate due diligence, you end up with the wackiness of firing a bunch of avian flu folks and having to bring them back because somebody was either ignorant or stupid,” Warner said.

Yet some Republicans are trumpeting Musk’s assertions. Harris noted how in recent meetings Musk has brought up that more than $300 million in pandemic-era loans from the Small Business Administration went to people listed as older than 115, an obvious fraud.

“It could only be done because he has software people and information technology people – as he proudly wears that shirt, tech support. He says that the technology in the federal government is way, way behind,” Harris said.

Exposing fraud in the SBA’s Paycheck Protection Program, which Trump signed into law five years ago, isn’t exactly groundbreaking.

The Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress, had already exposed holes in the PPP program that saved an estimated $12 billion and referred 669,000 loans for further federal investigation.

And complaints about outdated federal computer systems are standard. Schatz said 80 percent of all government computers are deemed “legacy,” essentially needing to be replaced.

That’s why Trump, using data provided by Musk in his speech to Congress on Tuesday, didn’t sound so original when he accused the Social Security Administration of making improper payments to people who had long ago died. Last March, the GAO identified $236 billion in improper payments from federal programs such as Medicare and PPP, two-thirds of which went to people who were not eligible.

As for Musk’s assertion that people 150 years old, obviously dead, are getting Social Security checks, experts have illustrated that it is not accurate and just a function of outdated computer systems. And as battles even with Cabinet secretaries have shown, some of Musk’s definitions of fraud in federal spending sound more like someone not familiar with how agencies function.

Yet some Republicans elevate the Musk team’s work to deity levels in finding waste. One line in Weber’s poem, as he relayed to The Washington Post’s Hannah Knowles after leaving a Wednesday meeting with Musk, included a line declaring he is “exactly what is needed now – his detractors about to have a cow.”

Acting like Musk alone can fix the issue almost assures his failure.

As federal courts have reminded the Trump administration over the past few weeks, Congress created these agencies, and lawmakers need to play a role in any cuts.

But there’s been little effort or discipline on these issues, as the long-ago fighters against wasteful spending like Proxmire, John McCain (R-Arizona), Jeff Flake (R-Arizona) and Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma) have either died or retired.

Coburn led the fight against the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere” earmark with $225 million to connect a remote Alaska town of about 50 people to an airport. No algorithm found that project. Keith Ashdown, an investigator for Taxpayers for Common Sense, discovered it and coined the term. He also traveled to the site with news crews.

When Coburn tried to redirect those funds to a Louisiana region hit by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, just 15 senators voted to do so.

Harry S. Truman’s rise to president came from chairing a special Senate committee that tried to root out wasteful military spending during World War II, leading to his selection as vice president and then succeeding Franklin D. Roosevelt after his death.

In March 1975, Proxmire’s first “Golden Fleece” award went to the National Science Foundation’s $84,000 study on why people fall in love. In 2015 Flake released his own version, “Jurassic Pork,” highlighting how some congressionally crafted earmarks had lived on longer than the lawmakers who sponsored them.

Flake walked through the Senate’s press galleries handing out his report and pork sandwiches.

The Grace Commission, despite some successes, got nowhere near as much as its initial ambition because about three-fourths of its recommendations required action by Congress.

In 2022, Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Virginia) introduced legislation to create a fraud division inside the Office of Management and Budget that could work across all agencies. The bill languished in committee and never received a vote.

“It’s about the will to get the cuts done,” Schatz said.