In what can only be described as a hit piece, the New York Times this week cast doubt on Department of Government Efficiency Chief Elon Musk’s statements that the government was losing exorbitant sums of money due to fraud. They derided him for not providing receipts during a specific press event and implied no proof existed, despite voluminous publicly-accessible evidence to the contrary.

“At Oval Office, Musk Makes Broad Claims of Federal Fraud Without Proof” the headline read. The entire article hinged on a relatively brief exchange between reporters and Musk and President Donald Trump in the Oval Office. The copy was riddled with flippant editorialization, such as a line describing Musk as “an unelected appointee with vast reach across the government” after quoting his own criticism of the federal bureaucracy as an “unelected, fourth, unconstitutional branch of government.” 

The article largely takes issue with the fact that Musk did not provide reporters with screenshots, receipts, and documentation for general claims about the pervasive nature of federal fraud at that exact moment. While he did not provide such materials in person, he directed reports to DOGE’s X account, where his aides have posted such materials available to the public. 

The DOGE website, published Wednesday, also currently boasts a page promising receipts to substantiate many of its findings “no later than Valentine’s Day.”

Getting rich off taxpayer money

Among the claims for which he offered no “proof” during the presser, were assertions that federal employees had accrued wealth well beyond their salaries and that U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) employees had received “kickbacks.”

“We do find it sort of rather odd that, you know, there are quite a few people in the bureaucracy who have ostensibly a salary of a few hundred thousand dollars but somehow managed to accrue tens of millions dollars in net worth while they are in that position, which is, you know what happened to USAID,” he said. “We’re just curious as to where it came from. Maybe they're very good at investing.”

To be sure, Musk did not provide reporters, at that moment, with the tax returns or other relevant financial statements of any USAID employees. In an attempted fact-check, the BBC chose former USAID Director Samantha Power, which pointed to a website claiming her net worth was between $10 and $30 million. The BBC noted that Musk’s source provided data from Powers’ own ethics disclosures and its own estimate put her net worth between $9 and $22 million before entering the job. Musk never mentioned Power during the presser.

IGs and GAO substantiated fraud and improper payments at USAID

Prior to DOGE, the Government Accountability Office and the relevant Inspectors General identified hundreds of billions in improper payments in a single year under President Joe Biden.

At USAID specifically, a September 2024 report from its Office of Inspector General highlighted an instance of USAID overpaying an employee working remotely from North Carolina by giving them pay commensurate with working in D.C. In that instance alone, the employee received nearly $10,000 more than was appropriate.

The GAO report from September 2024, for instance, warned that “the federal government could lose between $233 billion and $521 billion annually to fraud alone.” In fiscal year 2023, it found $236 billion in improper payments across 71 programs. Of that, six programs were responsible for about $200 billion of that sum. Those included Medicare, Medicaid, Unemployment Insurance, the Paycheck Protection Program, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and Supplement Security Income. That report from the non-partisan GAO was released under the Biden administration and available for months prior to Musk’s comments.

A separate GAO report on Medicare and Medicaid alone from April 2024 found that “both Medicare and Medicaid are susceptible to payment errors—over $100 billion worth in 2023.”

"Blank checks just flying out the building"

The Times sidestepped Musk’s discussion of the problems with the Treasury Department’s payment systems as a contributing factor to major fraud and instead merely cast doubts about his claims of 150-year-olds receiving Social Security. Musk, however, gave a tangible explanation explaining the failures in the Treasury’s safeguards.

“We're looking at, say Treasury, for example, basic controls that should be in place, that are in place in any company, such as making sure that any given payment has payment categorization codes, that there is a comment field that describes the payment, and that if a payment is on the Do Not Pay list, that you don't actually pay it,” Musk said. “None of those things are true currently.”

“So the reason that departments can't pass audits is because the payments don't have a categorization code. It's like just a massive number of blank checks just flying out the building. So you can't reconcile blank checks,” he added. “You've got comment fields that are also blanks. You don't know why the payment was made.”

“And then we've got this – truly absurd – a Do Not Pay list, which can take up to a year before an organization to get on a Do Not Pay list. And this we're talking about terrorist organizations,” he lamented. “We're talking about known fraudsters, known aspects of waste, known things that do not match any congressional appropriation. Can take up to a year to get on the list. And even once on the list, the list is not used. It's mind blowing.”

His explanation, moreover, largely aligns with the concerns of the GAO, which have warned about payment systems as the main vehicle for the improper disbursements.

Fraud vs. Waste

The GAO estimate only includes fraud and other improper payments. It did not address what Musk and other fiscal conservatives might deem to be “waste” such as Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs and myriad forms of foreign aid for questionable programs.

Musk has repeatedly suggested the elimination of fraud and waste alone may be enough to balance the budget. While DOGE has not yet posted a tally of total wasteful spending it has thus far identified, a cursory glance at the data on its X account would put the figure in the billions of dollars.

Should total improper payments be on the higher side of the GAO estimate at around $500 billion, the elimination of the Department of Education and its budget of nearly a quarter of a trillion, plus DOGE’s wasteful spending freezes, could put at least a $1 trillion spending reduction on the table in the near future.

But some outside analysts seem to think improper payments alone may account for much more than GAO believes. During the recent hearing of the Oversight Subcommittee for DOGE, Lexis/Nexis Risk Solutions CEO Haywood Talcove said that “you can save $1 trillion a year by simply putting in front-end identity verification, eliminating self-certification and monitoring the back end of the programs that are providing the benefits. Those three things.”

The New York Times did not respond to a request for comment.