WATCH: Elon Musk, DOGE Team Provide Behind-The-Scenes Look At Cost-Cutting Efforts

Elon Musk and a number of staffers working with the Trump Administration’s efforts to reduce wasteful government spending, commonly referred to as the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), provided an inside look at the team’s efforts in an interview with Fox News.

“We want to reduce spending by eliminating waste and fraud and reduce the spending by 15 percent, which seems really quite achievable,” Musk told “Special Report” host Bret Baier. “The government is not efficient, and there’s a lot of waste and fraud. So we feel confident that a 15 percent reduction can be done without affecting any of the critical government services.”

While DOGE lacks the ability to make cuts without congressional approval, the team has recommended billions-of-dollars in cuts without touching Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid. Several cuts made by DOGE will be finalized as a result of the recently signed budget resolution.

The budget measure will provide roughly $4.5 trillion in tax cuts with a goal of $2 trillion in spending cuts. It will also allocate roughly $100 billion in additional funding on immigration enforcement and defense spending. In addition, the legislation requires the House Energy and Commerce Committee to find $880 billion in cuts to federal programs.

Musk, who was joined by DOGE staffers Steve Davis, Joe Gebbia, Aram Moghaddassi, Brad Smith, Anthony Armstrong, Tom Krause and Tyler Hassen provided a behind-the-scenes look at how the team identifies programs and budget initiatives that should be cut. Davis pointed to federal credit cards, which he described as a “mundane” but “illustrative” example of DOGE’s work.

“There are in the federal government around 4.6 million credit cards for around 2.3 to 2.4 million employees. This doesn’t make sense. So one of the things all of the teams have worked on is we’ve worked for the agencies and said, ‘Do you need all of these credit cards? Are they being used? Can you tell us physically where they are?’” Davis explained.

“Clearly there should not be more credit cards than there are people,” Musk chimed in.

The team also explained how they have been approaching audits of the federal workforce, financial management, government infrastructure, computer systems and more, in addition to in-depth looks at programs that will not be cut like Social Security.

“They may characterize it as shooting from the hip, but it is anything but that,” Musk said, adding that the team approaches cuts by measuring “twice, if not thrice and cut once.”

“Which is not to say that we don’t make mistakes. If we were to approach this with the standard of making no mistakes at all, that would be like saying someone in baseball has got to bat a thousand. That’s impossible. So when we do make mistakes, we correct them quickly and we move on,” he added.

Musk also addressed relentless attacks from Democrats, stating that they never tend to mention “specifics” when criticizing the initiative.

Some of the more eye-popping cuts recommended by DOGE include the cancellation of multi-million-dollar NIH grants that sought to reduce the risk of pregnancy in “transgender boys” and a taxpayer-funded teacher training program that branded infants as “racists.”