The billionaire Elon Musk appeared alongside President Trump in the Oval Office on Tuesday and defended his efforts to overhaul and trim the federal government.
Mr. Musk has for weeks posted on social media about government spending, often amplifying and seeding false information. His remarks on Tuesday similarly included broad accusations, exaggerations and misleading claims.
Here’s a fact-check.
What Was Said
“We actually are trying to be as transparent as possible. In fact, our actions — we post our actions to the DOGE handle on X and to the DOGE website. So all of our actions are maximally transparent. In fact, I don’t think there’s been — I don’t know of a case where an organization has been more transparent than the DOGE organization.”
This is misleading. Mr. Trump designated Mr. Musk’s cost-cutting initiative, the Department of Government Efficiency, exempt from public records law for about a decade, and Mr. Musk’s financial disclosure will not be made public — actions at odds with Mr. Musk’s claims of maximum transparency. There is a website, doge.gov, but it appears to contain little information. And while DOGE does post about the contracts it has “terminated” on X, Mr. Musk’s social media website, the messages are noticeably light on substance.
For example, DOGE posted on Monday about terminating “29 D.E.I. training grants” totaling $101 million at the Education Department and cited a description in the award language of one grant. But it disclosed no additional information or citations about the 28 other grants.
Under the Freedom of Information Act, reporters and other members of the public could, for instance, file requests for records to understand who was involved in deciding to terminate those 29 grants and why DOGE chose them — information not clearly available in the social media post.
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