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Elon Musk and his Doge team’s unprecedented interview sheds light on America’s staggering government waste and inefficiency. With jaw-dropping revelations like a billion-dollar survey blunder and efforts to defraud social security, this discussion unveils the truth behind the bloated systems that drain taxpayer dollars. Listen in as we explore how these insights and the push for modernizing government practices could unite political fronts to advocate for a more functional governance system.
SPEAKER 07 :
In an unprecedented interview, Elon Musk and his Doge team make the case for their work.
SPEAKER 08 :
Keeping you informed and engaged, now more than ever, this is Sekulow. We want to hear from you. Share and post your comments or call 1-800-684-3110. And now your host,
SPEAKER 07 :
Welcome to Seculo on this Friday. Executive producer Will Haines here. We are going to be talking about this interview that was quite remarkable last night that Bret Baier conducted with Elon Musk and his Doge team. Now, seeing an interview from Elon Musk isn’t that remarkable in and of itself. He’s pretty friendly with the camera and being able to go out there and talk about his work. But the level of detail that we saw from both Elon Musk and the principals that are working with him on Doge was remarkable. Because what we’ve heard up until this point is a lot of anecdotes about singular projects or funding items that seemed a little off or wasteful or maybe even fraudulent to some. But they really got into the granular detail of what they’re finding out about the way our government works or doesn’t work for the American people. And I think that’s important because the left has been going after the entire Doge agenda since before the inauguration, when this was even mentioned or brought up or announced by President Trump that this would be a part of. of his presidency and you’ve heard the talking points like they’re gonna they’re gonna do away with social security or take away payments for medicare or or maybe that they’re gonna shutter the national parks or they’re gonna fire everyone or they’re going to break government but when you hear what they’re actually saying they are doing You realize that’s not the case at all. And so we are going to dive into that. And I want to hear from you. Did you watch this interview? Were you surprised at the level of detail they were giving, the transparency, not just about line items, but really the problems that they’re seeing within our government? So call me on this or anything else that we’ve talked about this week. on this friday i have a little bit of an open phones friday and call us at 1-800-684-3110 to get your call on air 1-800-684-3110 but before we go to our first break i do want to play this because this was one of the more shocking line items of all the ones that we’ve heard and this is bite two about some wasteful spending from the department of the interior let’s roll it
SPEAKER 06 :
For you, what’s the most astonishing thing you’ve found out in this process?
SPEAKER 10 :
The sheer amount of waste and fraud in the government. It is astonishing. It’s mind-blowing. We routinely encounter wastes of a billion dollars or more, casually. For example, the simple survey that was conducted literally a 10-question survey that you could do with SurveyMonkey cost you about $10,000. The government was being charged almost a billion dollars for that. For just the survey? A billion dollars for a simple online survey, do you like the national park? And then there appeared to be no feedback loop for what would be done with that survey. So the survey would just go into nothing. It was like insane.
SPEAKER 07 :
The U.S. government was paying almost a billion dollars for a customer service survey after you visited a national park. I’m sure many of you watching have probably received this survey just saying simple things like, did you enjoy your experience? Would you visit again? And they were spending almost a billion dollars of the taxpayers money on that. And to make things worse, it was complete waste because no one was even looking at the results of the survey to maybe make the customer service experience better. It was just a wasted billion dollars. But that’s not all they got into. So stick around. We’ve got a packed show today on this Friday. And we’re going to get into some of the more revelations from the work of the Doge team on Fox News last night with Brett Baer. You’re not going to want to miss it. But also, it’s so important what you heard last night. why you support us during this life in Liberty Drive. We’ve already filed seven briefs in five different courts to defend the Doge agenda fighting waste, fraud, and abuse in the government. And that work cannot be done without you. Our attorneys are hard at work, but you can join them by having your donations doubled at ACLJ.org. Now is the time to do it. We only have a few days left in our March Life and Liberty Drive. Join us today, ACLJ.org. Welcome back to Seculo. Executive producer Will Haines here. And our phone lines are open for you at 1-800-684-3110. Did you watch the interview last night with the Doge team? Or are you just now hearing these clips that we’re playing? What were your thoughts? Did it change your mind about the work they’re doing? If you had concerns, did it alleviate some of those? I’ll take calls on that or also any of the other topics that we’ve discussed this week. It’s been a very busy news week, so there’s a lot out there. But I wanted to play this as well because at the end of the first segment, we’re talking about this discovery that they made. It was around $830 million that the Department of the Interior had contracted with a company to perform a survey, a customer service survey. If you visited a national park, you would get an electronic survey of some sort that said, you know, did you enjoy the park? What could have made your experience better? Things of that nature. Things that Elon Musk pointed out could have been done with a very simple survey company like SurveyMonkey or something to that nature for like $10,000 at the volume they needed it. However, the U.S. government was using almost a billion dollars. It was $830 million to be exact of your taxpayer money for a survey to make sure people had a good time at our national parks. And then no one read the surveys. There was no feedback loop, as they said, to see and make changes. If there was criticisms of the experience at the national park, it was truly the definition of waste. almost a billion dollars spent for nothing. The survey exists. I’m sure it was collected. No one was using it and there was no purpose or plan to use this. And they’re saying they’re finding about a billion dollars casually thrown around here and there all the time. They’re trying to find $4 billion a day, seven days a week of this type of waste. There’s also the fraud issue, there’s the abuse issue, all within this. But one of the interesting things that I found was that there’s not enough focus on the name of the Department of Government Efficiency. The whole goal here is not just to fire everyone and break government. It is to make government more efficient. And they got into the details of why a lot of this money that they’re saying is being wasted. It doesn’t mean we just end the agency or in the department. What it means is we make it work better for the American people. So when they talk about cuts or lowering costs at a place like Social Security, it’s not because they want to cut the budget that is then going to go to individuals that receive those benefits. What they’re really doing is cutting the expensive nature in which that agency is run. They’re not administering Social Security benefits to the American people efficiently. Or well, they said 40% of the inbound calls to Social Security are people trying to defraud other American citizens by stealing their taxpayer benefits, their Social Security check. They’re trying to call in with enough information to get someone at Social Security to change the bank account so that they can take the money. 40% of people who are receiving these calls of their work that we are paying for their salary is going towards fraud, trying to stop fraud. Yes. By not hopefully changing that over, but that’s a large chunk of someone’s entire job and their job isn’t explicitly to stop fraud. Their job is to be a customer service representative for those that need help with their social security benefits. So one way you can make it more efficient is find ways to fix that problem and make sure that 40% of their time isn’t just getting phone calls from fraudsters and they can find a way to make it more efficient by your money being spent more wisely when you’re paying that salary that they’re doing other things to make Social Security better. But there’s a lot in this. And I want to get to some more of these bites because I think we’ll play this is by 12. This is from one of the software engineers about what he’s working on. And it’s not just finding things to cut or people to lay off. It’s finding ways to make these antiquated systems that everyone complains about interacting with these agencies better so that government works for you. Let’s go ahead and play Byte 12. This is from Aram Moghadassi. He is one of the software engineers on the team. And I just thought this was fascinating because it’s some of the first time you’re hearing things like this. Byte 12.
SPEAKER 02 :
I’ll say the first thing that got me really excited about Doge was learning basically the state of government computers. By some estimates, government IT costs about $100 billion, and it’s funding systems that 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 can make a difference here. And that’s really what inspired me at a high level.
SPEAKER 07 :
I’m going to go ahead and take a phone call here because Justin from California Online 3 is asking a great question, but it also kind of gets to the heart of what I was having an epiphany about during this interview last night. And so, Justin from California, you’re on Seculo.
SPEAKER 03 :
Hey, thanks so much for taking my call. Yeah, my question is this. Are there any Democrats at all that can join the Doge team or committee such as, dare I say, even someone like AOC? I mean, maybe not someone who we agree with on everything, but someone who just who’s just passionate about doing the right thing overall. You know what I mean?
SPEAKER 07 :
I know exactly what you mean. And I think when you listen to this interview last night, that was the first thing that popped in my head is that this messaging should get everyone on board. When you’re giving examples like of the survey or even just the technical systems, and we’ll get to more of these bites later, but of computer systems that don’t talk to each other. So it creates opportunities for fraudsters to be able to use enough data here and there to defraud the government. And to your point, I think that the Doge team is doing a great job, but I think there is one critique I have of it so far is that this interview just happened. This should have happened the first week. Because when you see the members of the team, not just Elon being the face of it, you hear how serious they are. You hear their CVs. You hear that one’s from Morgan Stanley. One is the co-founder of Airbnb, a software engineer, a literal rocket scientist. You realize that this isn’t what the media has been portraying. And you also realize their mission isn’t just to slash and burn everything at the federal government and break it for everyone. They actually have heart and care about the American taxpayer in the future of the country. And when you hear that, you should see support from Democrats. You should see them trying to get buy-in so that maybe they can protect the programs they want to protect. but still work towards that main goal of a more efficient government. Now, the Doge Committee, which we saw this week with the PBS and NPR hearing, that is a subcommittee within the U.S. House, which is doing oversight of Doge and also looking at ways they can implement things within their spending bills or maybe legislation that they come up with. But what you didn’t see was serious bipartisan support of the goal of making the government more efficient. you saw members of the left on the other side of the aisle pushing ridiculous narratives, trying to embarrass Republicans and vice versa, when you should be seeing a unified front on this. This is something everyone could get behind. And you may not like Elon Musk. You may not like President Trump. But if you’re a Democrat and you’re serious and you hear things like, Hmm. A billion dollars on a survey that did nothing or even a nine month old was allegedly able to get a loan from the Small Business Administration. Now, that can’t be right. Right. It’s because the Social Security Office doesn’t communicate with the computer systems, the Small Business Administration. So a fraudster was able to use a nine month old’s. uh social security number and obtain a small business administration loan because small business administration had no idea that that number was attached to a nine month old and the nine month old isn’t checking their credit report to see that they have a loan taken out in their name That’s the kind of fraud that they’re uncovering. Everyone, regardless of your political party, should support that kind of work. Fixing broken systems, systems from the 1950s should be updated. That should be bipartisan, but it’s not. You see the attacks. And I think that’s why the biggest mistake was not doing this type of interview earlier, because it’s hard to argue with what we saw last night. But the left has now been able to get their base rallied up. They are firebombing Tesla dealerships over Doge and standing out there picketing Elon Musk and saying that he’s taking away Social Security. And that’s not the reality of what they are doing. So they should have done it earlier. But hopefully this can be a pivot point and change a lot of minds. But we know that the left immediately went to court too. But so did the ACLJ. We have filed seven briefs in five different courts trying to defend Doge’s fight against fraud, waste, and abuse. Many of the things we’re talking about today. And the unitary power of the executive to be able to direct things like this. But we can’t do that work without you. So go now as we are in the final days of our March Life and Liberty Drive. Have your donation to the ACLJ doubled, ACLJ.org. Welcome back to Sekulow. Happy Friday to everyone watching. We’re talking about a lot of things today, but mostly focused on this really unprecedented interview last night that Elon Musk and the Doge team gave to Bret Baier at Fox News. It was very revealing about the real work that they’re doing, not just firing or laying off people, not just cutting budgets, but really trying to rework these agencies and bring them into the modern era, working it like a business instead of a bloated bureaucracy that is not getting anything done or advancing the interest of the United States. So I’ve got some other things I want to talk about in this segment as well. But I want to take a phone call because a lot of you are calling in. The lines are jammed right now. I’m going to try to free some of those up as we go today. But I’m going to go ahead and take, I think let’s take Michael calling from Florida on line four. He’s watching on YouTube, and he’s now on Sekulow. Go ahead, Michael.
SPEAKER 09 :
Gentlemen, one of the things I thought that was particularly typical of the media was the fact that they portrayed the Doge team as being skateboard minions for Elon. And these guys… as you were just saying, dovetailing off what you just talked about, were professionals, were high-ranking people of their own businesses, and they seemed to be equally as surprised and equally as stunned to find out and uncover the things that they were.
SPEAKER 07 :
I agree with you, Michael, and that’s part of the reason I think this interview should have been done a lot earlier. Yes, I’m sure some of the people that are the staffers of Doge are the younger, tech-minded computer engineers, things of that nature, data analysts. But you find that in any bureaucracy, really. You find younger people that are doing a lot of the grunt work. You find the principals are more seasoned and hopefully good at their job. But just to your point, like Steve Davis, he’s a literal rocket scientist. He’s worked at the Boring Company, at Twitter, now X and SpaceX. The Airbnb co-founder, he’s working on the retirement project of trying to clean up that retirement system in the government, which takes eight months to get retired, to retire out of the government. You have to take a course to learn how to retire. They can only retire 8,000 people a day. So that’s how they found out how inefficient it was. When they found out, they’re like, hey, we’re going to start offering this early retirement incentive. Like, well, you can only do 8,000 a day because that’s all we can do when it comes to the mine. Like, what mine? So they start realizing, peeling back the layers of the onion and realizing how inefficient the government is. And they’re trying to fix it. There’s a software engineer. There’s Brad Smith, who is a healthcare entrepreneur who’s working with an HHS. There is a Morgan Stanley banker who’s working in the Office of Personnel Management. Tom Krause, I almost said Tom Cruise, not the same. Tom Krause, who is a tech executive, CEO of the Cloud Software Group. And there was a former oil executive, Tyler Hassan, who is working at the Department of the Interior. Here’s the one who found out about the survey. And they’re saying they’re finding those billion-dollar contracts casually. as they go through this. And we’re going to keep talking about this because we’re fighting for this in court. We’re fighting the left’s attack, trying to shut it down, saying they don’t have the authority to make the government better. At the end of the day, that’s what they’re arguing. And when you watch that last night, they can’t square their argument that either they just don’t care and they want whatever Elon Musk or President Trump or anyone in the administration does, they want to oppose it. So they don’t care about their constituents. They don’t care about the individuals on Social Security that they represent. They just want… the Republicans or those that are conservatives to fail. You look at this group and you don’t see a bunch of traditional college Republicans that just graduated from a Southern school that are going in and saying, I’m a fiscal conservative. I think many of these may be apolitical or maybe even lean left in their politics, but what they are is they’re good at what they do. They’re good at finding ways to make systems work better. And the US government is a big system. It’s a bloated system in many areas. But they’re doing good work. And I think that this really revealed a lot of it. But I also want to talk about the campaign that we’re doing in Massachusetts. You’ve heard about that on this program before. We discovered it was when Logan, Logan Sekulow was in Boston with his children and family, and they were going to see American history. and some of the sites there but what they also saw was something a little bit more historic as well and that was the the campaign that was state funded by the state of massachusetts spending millions of dollars attacking pregnancy resource centers those are life-saving facilities that the aclj has stood with for decades they give people hope they give people options they give them support to make a different choice other than abortion. And when Logan got back, he said, I want to fight this any way we can. So we took a two pronged approach. We first, started working immediately on a counter ad campaign to run in Massachusetts to show people that they have options other than what the state line is saying. And that state line is that you can only choose abortion if you have an unplanned pregnancy. You have to go here. Don’t go to places that give you hope or options. And unfortunately, that campaign was working because we got the data and it showed that abortions were going up year over year in the state since this campaign started working and visits to pregnancy resource centers were going down. But we also think it’s a violation of the constitutional rights of these pregnancy resource centers because it is viewpoint discrimination. They are discriminating against abortion. the pregnancy resource centers in their community by spending taxpayer money to combat them by calling them fake clinics. So we’re fighting that in court too. So this is a very expensive, very novel approach to fight back at this. One of our attorneys was telling us this is really kind of a first in the nation approach that you’re seeing. One, we’re running the ad campaign and we know people are actually going to the website to find pregnancy resource centers after seeing these ads, after seeing billboards or commercials. But also, we’re now waiting for a very pivotal moment in our lawsuit where we’re saying, hey, Massachusetts, you can’t do this. So we had to argue because the state and the parties that were also in this as well are saying, hey, judge, they don’t have standing. Throw this out. They filed a motion to dismiss. Our attorneys argued that. that it should stand and that this should go forward. And right now that’s before the judge. So our attorneys are waiting to see what the judge’s decision is, if they will try to give an early victory to the abortion industry in the state and say, we’re going to throw this out. But this has all the hallmarks of a case that could end up at the Supreme Court. And we’re going to fight it all the way there if needed. Because it’s not okay. It’s not okay for the state to use taxpayer funds to go after and try to shut down pro-life pregnancy resource centers. And we’re not going to let it happen. But we’re also… running this ad campaign to help change people’s hearts and minds and see that they have other choices, not just what the state wants you to believe. And the only choice they give you is abortion. I’ll show some of those ads later in the broadcast, but you can help this expensive, multifaceted campaign right now, both in the court and through our ad campaign. Go to ACLJ.org today. Your donation is doubled during the Life and Liberty Drive. Go today.
SPEAKER 08 :
keeping you informed and engaged, now more than ever. This is Sekulow.
SPEAKER 07 :
Welcome to Seculo. Will Haines, executive producer, here with you on this beautiful Friday. And we are talking about this really unprecedented interview that was given by Elon Musk and his team at Doge to Bret Baier and Fox News last night. And really getting into the nitty gritty, the granular details of things that they’re uncovering and discovering. As they go through the federal bureaucracies, as they go through these agencies, they even said things like, if the federal government had to pass an audit, like every business in America has to be ready to pass, they would fail because they can’t tell you where dollars are going. And the United States has one single bank account, the general fund from the Treasury, that everyone is just pulling money out of. And many times the proper codes aren’t given as they’re drawing money off of. They said there’s over 4 million credit cards tied to the U.S. government, but only 2 to 2.5 million people that are authorized to have them. So this is just credit cards floating around out there. with your taxpayer money attached to it. I don’t know how the left can say these things are okay, but we’re not even seeing a moderated approach from the majority of the Democrat party. We’re not seeing many of them say, I don’t like how aggressive they’re going, but we want to work with them to root out those type issues. No, instead you are seeing them encourage protesters against a car dealership. And many of those protesters have agitators inside that take it even steps further into domestic terrorism. They’re firebombing clinic, not clinics. They’re firebombing car dealerships, Tesla dealerships. They’re throwing Molotov cocktails. They are spray painting cars, keying cars. It’s really shocking when you think about and you hear what they’re trying to do and what is being protested. You can’t square it. Either they don’t care and the only thing they want is a political victory to see Donald Trump and Elon Musk and the entire administration taken down. Or they are for waste, fraud, and abuse. There’s no other answer. They either want the administration to fail so badly that they will turn a blind eye to these things. and making the country better, making the government more efficient, making it work better for the taxpayers, or they’re okay with it. There’s no other option there. So hopefully this changes some Democrats’ minds hearing this and saying, you know what? I’m not fully taken over by Trump derangement syndrome. Maybe we can work with this team so that the main goals are reached and And then I can protect my liberal interest as well in there. I’d like to see it. I think America would like to see that. Maybe that’s a reason that the Democrats’ poll numbers are at all-time lows. People don’t approve of what they’re doing. So maybe they should get on board with this because I think it would be better for everyone. But they won’t. They won’t. They’re suing to have it shut down. all across the country, whenever they can. You know what’s coming next? As soon as President Trump says, I’m gonna cut off funds to Planned Parenthood, going straight to court. They’ve already got the brief written, the complaint, I’m certain of it. But we’ll be there too. We already have filed seven briefs in five different courts. to protect the mission of doge that they are going to fight against waste fraud and abuse in this country to make the country and the government work better for everyone not just one party everyone but we know that they’ll come after that too as soon as planned parenthood’s funds are put on hold they’ll sue and say we deserve it but we’ll fight there too. The lawyers on our team are already getting our responses ready, knowing it’s coming, and you can be a part of that. You can support the ACLJ at ACLJ.org and have your gift doubled. Welcome back to Seculo. I’m joined in studio right now by Professor Harry Hutchison. And we also are going to talk about the Doge interview and some of the things he picked up on. But I also wanted to bring this up because we’re coming to the end of this week, obviously, and the end of the month, which is the end of our March Life and Liberty Drive, which you can be a part of at ACLJ.org. But one thing we know that’s happening early in the month of April is It’s kind of tariff day. April 2nd is what President Trump has been talking about pointing to when many of these tariffs could go into effect. And there’s been a lot of movement on what percentages for what countries. You’re seeing some countries preemptively try to get ahead of it. I know India, which has… astronomical tariffs on the United States has already tried to whittle some of those down to try and show that they’re going to engage this in good faith. But I think one thing that you notice, Professor Hutchison, is how many countries tariff our goods when we are not doing the same. But as people… look ahead to April 2nd. We’ve seen with the threat of them, the market dipped some. We’ve seen the media try to make this into this catastrophic world event that we’re heading into. But we know that We can look at this and we can analyze it sensibly and not say that the sky is falling and try to figure out and give people some information about what we expect to come next week.
SPEAKER 05 :
I think that’s precisely correct. So number one, we should note that this move by President Trump is a move in the direction of reciprocity, meaning that Trump the United States is prepared to impose tariffs on countries that impose tariffs on us. In other words, many countries out there in Western Europe, India, and Canada do not play by the rules, but they demand that the United States, in effect, subsidize production. That’s number one. Number two, we should note that during the first Trump term, Notwithstanding his imposition of tariffs, that inflation was kept under control. So the maximum inflation rate during the first Trump administration was 2.4% on an annual basis, down to 1.2% in 2020. Number two, we should, I’m sorry, number three, we should note that the Biden administration has presided over astronomical increases in government spending, which did two things. It drove inflation up. And it drove mortgage rates up, thereby pricing many Americans out of house and home. So I think those individuals that claim that the sky is falling because Donald Trump is imposing tariffs do not understand either economics or history.
SPEAKER 07 :
Well, and to that point, I think a lot of this is media-generated outrage when it comes to any move. We see that with even the Department of Government Efficiency, and we’ll talk about that in a minute. But as we look at this, we hear how terrible tariffs are going to be and that industry will crumble and things of that nature, which is all hyperbole, obviously. But This isn’t like it’s one the first time that President Trump has imposed tariffs. He was the president in 2016 to 2020 and used tariffs as a part of his playbook. And actually, except for the blip at the end, the global pandemic, which no one could have planned for. Right. The economy, in spite of tariffs, which would violate the common knowledge that the leftist economists have told us, actually didn’t crater our economy. I feel like our economy did pretty well in that first four years.
SPEAKER 05 :
I think that’s precisely correct. And in a tacit acknowledgement that tariffs are not all bad, the Biden administration capped at least 50% of Donald Trump’s tariffs tax. on goods and services. So tariffs are not all bad, number one. Number two, from the perspective of working Americans, tariffs are actually good news in the auto industry, in the aluminum industry, in the steel industry. Why? Because of foreign competition, which is unfairly damping down demand for US goods and services. And the last point I will make is raising tariffs in the United States incentivizes foreign manufacturers to move production facilities to the United States. Hyundai announced a $20 billion investment yesterday or the day before. So this is good news long run for the American people. I am not going to suggest there will never be any troubled waters with respect to tariffs, but I think at the end of the day, tariffs can be part of a sound economic strategy, and it’s much sounder to impose tariffs than to do what the Biden administration did, which is to ramp up government spending in an unrestrained manner so that inflation hit a peak of around 9% to 10% during the Biden-Harris administration.
SPEAKER 07 :
I’m going to shift now to what we’ve been talking about for the majority of this show and talk about this interview with Elon Musk and the team at Doge, which an interview with Elon Musk is not all that remarkable because he does a lot of them. But what we saw here was really the first time these key players that are working with him, The ones that really are doing the work, I’d say. He has kind of been the spokesman and the principal of it all. But really, you’re starting to hear from these individuals that are… not low level entry level computer engineers just out of university these are are many people that have run multiple companies that have done very well that are very successful and they are effectively becoming civil servants for a time to do this because they believe in the cause and one thing you and i were talking about is that the The messaging of this was so well done last night and it should have been done earlier. But I think one of the biggest problems that Doge has had is that they didn’t really have a spokesperson that could combat the media narrative. Their spokesperson was Elon Musk. And when you already are the boogeyman, it’s hard for you to be an effective communicator of the truth about what you’re doing. So I just want to get your thoughts on that.
SPEAKER 05 :
Well, number one, the interview that occurred last night should have occurred at least six weeks ago. That’s number one. Number two, that particular interview exposed the Doge team as a group of very experienced individuals. They have experience in banking, experience in engineering, manufacturing, computers. And they’re not just 22-year-old whippersnappers who could care less about the consequences of their decision-making. That interview showed that the Doge team has engaged in a deliberate strategy of saving the American people money and saving very essential services for the American people, including Social Security. And one of the things that was stunning to listen to was the fact that 40% of the phone calls to the Social Security Administration, 40%, are essentially fraudulent. In other words, someone is trying to get into a legitimate Social Security recipient’s bank account and steal the funds. Also, we have learned that nine-month-old kids are applying for small business loans and other government services. So we know that there is fraud, there is abuse. And so I think Doge needs to do more of this and they need to attempt to recruit A Democrat who is actually interested in achieving the objectives of Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. If you look at those two administrations, they talked about doing a lot of the things that Elon Musk and his team are doing today. So this approach, the Doge approach, should have bipartisan support. And I know it’s going to be really difficult in an age where individuals like Jasmine Crockett carry the banner for the Democratic Party, or AOC, or Bernie Sanders. These individuals are simply flamethrowers. But there are still sensible Democrats out there. They need to be enlisted into the Doge effort.
SPEAKER 07 :
To your point, Harry, I don’t know that Barack Obama could get elected with this Democrat electorate now. I think you’re precisely correct. I think he would be too rational and reasonable for the Democrats of today. Because he said many of these very things that he wanted to make government more efficient when he ran. Now, there are people like Ezra Klein, a commentator at New York Times, opinion editor, that says they broke all their promises. They promised efficiency and new things and never gave it to us. We can talk about that in the next segment as well. But join us today. Support the ACLJ as we just have a few days left in our life in Liberty Drive. Donate today at ACLJ.org. Your tax-deductible gift is doubled. Welcome to Sekulow, and I’ll be taking your phone calls in this final segment of the day. Thank you for joining me on a Friday. Let’s go ahead and go to Jamal, who’s calling from North Carolina, listening on the radio. Line one, you’re on the air, Jamal.
SPEAKER 04 :
Thank you for taking my phone call. I was wondering, with all the Doge initiatives, With the $850 billion that I’ve heard that the Department of Defense has, I was wondering if they’re just going to look into any of that, if they’re going to make any cuts to that.
SPEAKER 07 :
Well, I know that many of these type of things were brought up in the interview last night. They are wanting to get into the Pentagon as well. I know that Pete Hegseth has been very favorable of this. And the Pentagon is one of those that is probably easy, again, for the Democrats to try to say they’re going to cut things and it’s going to make Americans less safe. So this is an entire program to harm American national security. When in reality… The Pentagon, who, as you mentioned, has 850 billion some odd dollar budget, has failed seven audits in a row. They can’t account for all the money they spend. And Elon Musk actually brought up something like this last night in the interview where Susan Collins was upset. The senator from Maine, not normally one of the favorites of the MAGA crowd. But in talking with Elon, she revealed that she got passed through in a budget $12 billion, $12 billion for some new submarines for the Navy. And later they went back and they said, we passed this through. You got the $12 billion. Where are the submarines? None had been built. None were delivered. Well, where’d the $12 billion go? We don’t know. That’s astounding that the large budget and the way that even the Pentagon, our national defense has been run. They can’t pass an audit. They can’t account for their money. There needs to be accountability to the American people. The left likes to talk about paying their fair share in taxes, that the billionaires need to pay their fair share and all these lines that they parrot. They should be on board with this saying, we need to ensure that the taxes we collect are spent appropriately and not lost all over the place. Money just spilling out of government. That’s a cause that Americans would resonate with. And then you can say everyone pay their fair share, but it’s hard to make the case when you start to see how poorly managed our taxpayer dollars are. And that if the government couldn’t pass an audit, you know they expect the American people to be able to pass an audit if the IRS comes a-knockin’. So there is a large disconnect in the way that the bureaucracy has run our country for far too long. And I love that it’s being exposed because on the right, fiscal conservatism has been preached for decades, my entire life. That has been one of the core values of the Republican Party of conservatism is fiscal responsibility, fiscal conservatism. But what you’ve seen is that no one really did anything about it. No one in Congress really Even the ones that tried to put bills forward, the vast majority of Congress would not let it go forward. They’re finally doing something about it and people are trying to stop it in court because they’re so afraid of it being cut off. But we’re fighting in court. We filed seven different briefs in five different courts defending this work because this is the heart of fiscal conservatism. And we’re fighting to see that it can be done. Let’s get to more phone calls. Let’s go to Sarah calling from Connecticut on the radio. Sarah, you’re on Sekulow.
SPEAKER 11 :
Yes, thank you. I’m very concerned about a lot of things, but I can just read them all. When they lay off thousands of people, what happened to the man who was picking up the papers and keeping the offices clean? Is he laid off too?
SPEAKER 07 :
Well, Sarah, I think that the you’re asking specifically about people that are janitorial staff, I believe, or things in there. Is everyone getting laid off? I think I think what you’re seeing based off this interview, that it’s not just firing in mass. In reality, they said very few people have been straight up just fired. There’s the deferred resignation where you have months of pay and don’t have to go to work so you can find a new job. But no, I don’t think that they’re trying to say that jobs that are necessary are going to be cut. I don’t think that keeping the offices clean would be viewed as improper spending. However, many of the offices they’re finding out no one goes to and they’re still paying for it to be cleaned. So I think there is nuance that was needed here that I think was provided a little bit last night. But that’s why I think they need a better spokesman for Doge than Elon Musk, because, Sarah, I don’t want to see anyone just in mass laid off for no reason. there will be people who do not have a government job after this, because even as they said, there’s so much redundancy of doing the same job 40 different times in 40 different places when that’s not necessary. So the scare tactics that I have seen have worked a lot of people are concerned about it of course everyone’s concerned about people just losing their job but there are many jobs that aren’t necessary in in the federal government the way it works and i would argue that that’s not the janitorial staff that is not necessary Those people that are cleaning the offices, I think, will continue to. And you know what’s better? They’ll have more work to do because people will be coming back into those offices because they haven’t been. Let’s take another call. Let’s go to Al calling from California. I’m going to try to get both of you in. So, Alfred, hang on. But, Al, really quickly, we’re running short on time.
SPEAKER 12 :
Yes. My question is, this wasted fraud, who… is receiving these funds? Are they being funneled to a shell company where nobody knows
SPEAKER 07 :
the ownership of the entity or the individuals well i al i’m gonna jump in right there i think there’s a lot of different options here i mean some like the company that uh got a billion dollar contract from the government to do a survey i think they did the job i think they put the survey out it was just waste so there there’s no there’s no criminal fraud there it’s just wasted money and so the the person who got the contract is like great yeah we’ll do this for a billion dollars but then there are people like the ones calling social security those are individuals that are trying to hijack social security numbers and the bank accounts and try to take payments and uh i’m not an expert on social security fraud fortunately uh but i know that it happens often and that sometimes these individuals aren’t even in the united states and they’re able to funnel it in different ways so That’s not an easy answer just to say one or the other. Alfred, really quick, I want to get your question on. You’ve got about 10, 15 seconds.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, so when I heard that Maura Healy was recommending that pregnant women go to abortion clinics, I was very saddened. And then when I saw the billboards about it, I was just horrified being in Massachusetts. So… I was happy to make a donation today to the Life and Liberty Fund, but I really think prayer is what we need to get rid of this evil behind the left.
SPEAKER 07 :
100% Alfred, prayer for the state of Massachusetts. Prayer for the ACLJ and our attorneys that are fighting in court. And thank you, Alfred, for donating. You can donate like Alfred. Make a difference in Massachusetts and around the country. ACLJ.org. Have your tax-deductible gift doubled today. ACLJ.org.
