Elon Musk and members of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team appeared on Fox News Thursday and named the federal agency that resisted their oversight efforts the most aggressively.
President Donald Trump announced in November that Musk would lead DOGE to cut regulations, eliminate waste and overhaul federal agencies. During an interview on “Jesse Watters Primetime,” Musk and the DOGE team revealed the agency that resisted them the most. While looking into that agency’s operations, DOGE made some surprising discoveries.
“The small agency called the United States Institute of Peace is definitely the agency we had the most fight at. We actually went into the agency and found they had loaded guns inside of their headquarters,” one unidentified DOGE member said.
“I mean, any given company, any given organizational name is going to be kind of the opposite of the title,” Musk told host Jesse Watters.
Musk’s team also said they uncovered troubling financial practices.
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“So it was, by far, the least peaceful agency that we’ve worked with, ironically. Additionally, we found that they were spending money on things like private jets, and they even had a $130,000 contract with a former member of the Taliban,” the DOGE team member said. “So it was a contractor. They received $130,000 for generic services. And, to Elon’s point, there was not actually a clear description of what the contractor services were for.”
Watters asked whether the funds paid for opium. One DOGE team member said the answer was unclear.
“And you naturally have to ask the question ‘How did we get here?’ When the country was founded, there were only four agencies,” the DOGE member said. “Today, there are over 400. So there’s been a 100 X increase in the number of agencies since the founding of the nation. And thanks to President Trump, he’s now signed two executive orders to start to reduce the number of agencies in the government.”
The Institute of Peace became one of the first targets for audit and potential closure, which is how the DOGE team began their deep dive into its operations. Within hours of arriving, the team discovered another bombshell.
“The Institute of Peace was one of them, which is why our team went into trying to understand what was going on. And that’s when we found all the craziness, like the weapons in their armory. We found the payments to the Taliban,” the DOGE team member said. “So just a few hours after we got into their headquarters, we found that their chief accountant had actually deleted over a terabyte of accounting records from several leaders. So you’d have to ask the question, well, why would somebody do that?”
Thanks to internal whistleblowers, the DOGE team managed to recover the records.
“I think the most troubling thing was they received $55 million a year from Congress and any money that went unspent, instead of returning that to Congress, they would sweep it into a private bank account, which had no congressional oversight,” the DOGE team member said. “And that’s what they would use to fund things like events at their headquarters and the private jets. And so I think it’s a great example because most Americans don’t know what’s going on at a lot of these smaller agencies.”
Musk said that rooting out government waste hasn’t been easy but insisted his team is making progress. Musk said the mission behind DOGE will continue well beyond the first 100 days. Musk previously said he plans to scale back his full-time involvement with DOGE.
Musk said DOGE has found its rhythm and no longer requires the round-the-clock attention he’s been giving it since the administration began. He said he won’t step away entirely from DOGE and told reporters he plans to remain involved in D.C. about two days a week.
(Featured Image Media Credit: Screenshot/Fox News)
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