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.
The New York Times has obtained emails through the public information law that have shown, for example, efforts by a former Trump administration official to include relatives in official meetings and by Hunter Biden to solicit government assistance while his father was vice president. House Republicans last year strongly objected to efforts by the National Institutes of Health to skirt the law.
What Was Said
“I’m not sure we should be sending $50 million worth of condoms to anywhere. Frankly, I’m not sure that’s something Americans would be really excited about and that is really an enormous number of condoms if you think about it. But, you know, if it went to Mozambique instead of Gaza, I’m like OK, that’s not as bad, but still you know, why are we doing that?”
This is exaggerated. In response to a question from a reporter, Mr. Musk freely acknowledged a claim that he and others in the administration have pushed for weeks may have been inaccurate: that the U.S. Agency for International Development had sent $50 million of condoms to the Gaza Strip. “We will make mistakes, but we’ll act quickly to correct any mistakes,” Mr. Musk said. Then he proceeded to overstate the amount of contraceptives that the agency had sent to Gaza, the province in Mozambique.
While there are tens of millions of dollars in federal grants awarded to charities for the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases and H.I.V. in Gaza, Mozambique, that is not limited to providing contraceptives.
U.S.A.I.D. said in a report that it had provided about $5.4 million in contraceptives — including oral contraceptives and implants, but no condoms — to Mozambique in the 2023 fiscal year.
Worldwide that year, the agency delivered $60.8 million worth of contraceptives, including more than $7.1 million in male condoms and $1 million in female condoms.
What Was Said
“Crazy things like just cursory examination of Social Security and we’ve got people in there that are 150 years old.”
This needs context. Mr. Musk has a point that there are such examples of improbably old people with active Social Security files as well as billions of dollars in overpayment or erroneous payments in Social Security. But whether those examples amount to an extraordinary amount of fraud, as he has claimed on social media, is a matter of opinion and requires additional context.
Last year, a report from the Social Security Administration’s inspector general’s office found that the agency had issued $71.8 billion in improper payments from fiscal years 2015 to 2022. That figure represents about 0.84 percent of $8.6 trillion in benefits paid over that time. A November 2021 report estimated that the agency had made $298 million in payments after death to about 24,000 beneficiaries, and urged the agency to improve the timeliness and accuracy of its death data.
The inspector general’s office also reported in 2023 that there were some 18.9 million people born in 1920 or earlier with Social Security numbers but no death information in the electronic file the agency uses to identify each person. About 44,000 of those people were receiving Social Security Benefits. The Census Bureau estimated that there were about 86,000 people in the United States older than 100.
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