Eric Eggers
Appearances
Morning Wire
The DOGE Data: Musk Slashes Billions in Government Waste | 3.15.25
But I think they've actually been more successful, John, in changing the way we have conversations about budgeting in the federal government. I'm old enough to remember when Mitt Romney essentially ran for president on this back in 2012 with the platform of we're spending more than we're making. Our budget is deficits are leading to death. It's costing us way too much money and interest.
Morning Wire
The DOGE Data: Musk Slashes Billions in Government Waste | 3.15.25
And the American people largely yawned. And so fast forward 13 years later, now it's something that's leading the news. You're reporting on this and it's become a focus of the current presidential administration. That's ultimately the success I think Doge has had. We're making cutting spending cool again, or they are, and we're happy for it.
Morning Wire
The DOGE Data: Musk Slashes Billions in Government Waste | 3.15.25
Yeah, I think the Trump administration has become the most radically transparent administration in recent memory, potentially even in American history. I think certainly in American history, when you consider the fact that everything's being exposed in real time. And so things like even his conversation with President Zelenskyy
Morning Wire
The DOGE Data: Musk Slashes Billions in Government Waste | 3.15.25
a couple of weeks ago it make more sense if you look at it in the context of no things are no longer pre-packaged and hidden from the american people and then messaged in a very intentional way that's quite honestly quite deceitful as certain things were in the biden administration now you're seeing for yourself you are the first consumer of the organic material and you can decide hey what you know was
Morning Wire
The DOGE Data: Musk Slashes Billions in Government Waste | 3.15.25
President Trump and J.D. Vance rude or was President Zelensky rude? What happened there? And that's exactly what's happened here. They're saying, listen, we have lots of ridiculous contracts to do things like. pay for military members to have conversations about how to have DEI conversations with online avatars.
Morning Wire
The DOGE Data: Musk Slashes Billions in Government Waste | 3.15.25
And you've heard the numbers of examples of, you know, transgender studies in different countries. And so it's all quite ridiculous. And so the fact that Elon Musk and his team at X can take the specific examples and give them directly to the American people. I mean, remember it wasn't that long ago where
Morning Wire
The DOGE Data: Musk Slashes Billions in Government Waste | 3.15.25
a lot of other media platforms had employees threatened to quit if anything in a non complimentary way was said about members of the trans movement. So that's how dramatically different the conversation even is. Not only are we willing to say, listen, I'm not sure spending money on translate issues is worth tax dollars, And you're not threatened with a boycott or being canceled.
Morning Wire
The DOGE Data: Musk Slashes Billions in Government Waste | 3.15.25
That actually now gets elevated by a significant percentage of the American people because that's ultimately what they chose when they chose Donald Trump as president. They said, listen, we just want people to be honest. We want to stop playing games, not just in terms of like what people are told to be our values, but then what they're spending our money on towards those values.
Morning Wire
The DOGE Data: Musk Slashes Billions in Government Waste | 3.15.25
Yeah, so they're willing to cut or proposing to cut up to 25% or a quarter of that space. I think that they're targeting something like a 63% reduction in the public building services division, according to the General Services Agency, which oversees the federal real estate. Something like a thousand workers are estimated to be removed from the workforce.
Morning Wire
The DOGE Data: Musk Slashes Billions in Government Waste | 3.15.25
And this is just one of a number of agencies that are saying, listen, we're going to take this quite seriously. Some people have suggested it's all sort of smoke and mirrors and there's no real follow through.
Morning Wire
The DOGE Data: Musk Slashes Billions in Government Waste | 3.15.25
And the fact that there was and will be a vote on a continuing resolution by Congress suggests, well, there was an effort to try to fund everything this year at last year's levels, which some said would maybe neuter funding. Doge's efforts.
Morning Wire
The DOGE Data: Musk Slashes Billions in Government Waste | 3.15.25
But then no less than Secretary of State Marco Rubio has come out and said, listen, USAID, which is under the Department of State, that was the first agency to be targeted for a thorough analysis by Doge. And Marco Rubio said, listen, now after a six-week review, we're going to cancel 83% of the programs. That's tens of billions of dollars in savings. represented by 5,200 contracts.
Morning Wire
The DOGE Data: Musk Slashes Billions in Government Waste | 3.15.25
And so I think that just shows you that the process is working. You have Doge come in from the outside, they identify these things, they hold them up. And then at President Trump's direction at a recent cabinet meeting, the agency heads themselves are the ones that are gonna ultimately kind of put into place those actual cuts. So I think that's actually how the government is supposed to work.
Morning Wire
The DOGE Data: Musk Slashes Billions in Government Waste | 3.15.25
And so I think we're seeing that happen in real time, kind of for the first time in American history. And now to your point, John, about the pushback, I think that's another sign of how successful Doge has been because the conversation has changed even around that. So the conversation is no longer like, oh, is that something we should be spending money on?
Morning Wire
The DOGE Data: Musk Slashes Billions in Government Waste | 3.15.25
The conversation is, well, yeah, sure, Doge is being effective, but it's a drop in the bucket as compared to what the actual federal deficit is, as if the goal of Doge was, was something other than just to identify things that the American people would say, we don't want our tax dollars spent on that. The goal of Doge is not to single-handedly rescue the American budget deficit.
Morning Wire
The DOGE Data: Musk Slashes Billions in Government Waste | 3.15.25
The goal of Doge is to eliminate wasteful spending and getting rid of waste, fraud, and abuse, and that's what they're doing.
Morning Wire
The DOGE Data: Musk Slashes Billions in Government Waste | 3.15.25
Yeah, it's significant. It started the second Trump administration with 100,000 employees. And they're prepared to cut that in at least half, according to some reporting. And so there was a very high profile example of the Biden administration hiring 88,000 more IRS agents. And there was some talk about giving them weapons.
Morning Wire
The DOGE Data: Musk Slashes Billions in Government Waste | 3.15.25
But as of right now, we've got 100,000 that are suggesting cutting it in half. And of course, some people will say, well, that's no way to run a government. The Trump administration is making noise about replacing the internal revenue service with the external revenue service with the implementation of new tariffs.
Morning Wire
The DOGE Data: Musk Slashes Billions in Government Waste | 3.15.25
It remains to be seen if that happens and if it does, how much revenue they'll actually bring in. But. The IRS is another one. And based on what we've been able to identify, it does seem, if you can believe it, John, that cutting the IRS staff by half does seem to be something that a majority of Americans favor. Wow.
Morning Wire
The DOGE Data: Musk Slashes Billions in Government Waste | 3.15.25
So I would say this is another example of just having an honest conversation in a transparent way about the way government's supposed to work. We all heard the fact that democracy was on the ballot during the election last year. The fact that Donald Trump won. You saw Democrats protesting during his most recent congressional address that he's a dictator.
Morning Wire
The DOGE Data: Musk Slashes Billions in Government Waste | 3.15.25
The fact that the Supreme Court actually sided with a lower court judge in stopping the freeze on some USAID funding suggests that the multiple levers of government continue to work and that it's not just a unilateral effort on behalf of President Trump to just decree what he wants to happen and everyone else complies. The Supreme Court obviously did not in that instance.
Morning Wire
The DOGE Data: Musk Slashes Billions in Government Waste | 3.15.25
But Congress does appear to be willing to come to his rescue. So there's an effort this week to do something called rescission. And this is Basically, it's an executive order that Ronald Reagan used a lot. In 1981, he proposed 133 rescissions and Congress approved 101 of them. Basically, he says, listen, I think this is a specific thing that we should no longer fund.
Morning Wire
The DOGE Data: Musk Slashes Billions in Government Waste | 3.15.25
We should rescind the funding of it. And so Congress has the opportunity to do that. There's an expectation that they will attempt to do that on the budget for things like those proposed cuts.
Morning Wire
The DOGE Data: Musk Slashes Billions in Government Waste | 3.15.25
And the good news for congressional Republicans and for the Trump administration is it requires only a simple majority on behalf of Congress to do that, which is good for Republicans because that's all they have.
Morning Wire
The DOGE Data: Musk Slashes Billions in Government Waste | 3.15.25
Well, John, just to your point about the role that Elon Musk is playing, not just from an identification of wasteful spending, but also as essentially a chief marketing officer for this effort.
Morning Wire
The DOGE Data: Musk Slashes Billions in Government Waste | 3.15.25
The reason why I think they've had so much success in anything they've attempted to do, including getting his nominees passed and having votes held in a way that's favorable for the Trump administration is largely due to the unwavering support of Elon Musk and the fact that he can use Twitter to put pressure on vulnerable and potentially
Morning Wire
The DOGE Data: Musk Slashes Billions in Government Waste | 3.15.25
so i guess it depends on how you want to measure accomplishments if we're talking just dollars and cents i think that their accomplishments are quite quantifiable they've identified something like 105 billion dollars worth of things that can be cut between a combination of lease terminations contract cancellations and then federal employees who will be let's call it excused from the federal workforce and obviously some of those federal government leases
Morning Wire
The DOGE Data: Musk Slashes Billions in Government Waste | 3.15.25
weak members of this Trump coalition and so I think there's the fact that you saw people like Joni Ernst vote in favor of someone like Pete Hegseth when she'd previously expressed a significant reluctance to do so does speak in part to the power of let's call it a transparent effort to elevate.
Morning Wire
The DOGE Data: Musk Slashes Billions in Government Waste | 3.15.25
Here's somebody who's potentially pushing back on this and they hear from a lot of their constituents and it seems to be working so far.
Morning Wire
The DOGE Data: Musk Slashes Billions in Government Waste | 3.15.25
I would say it's at least as effective as creating social media content where you have female members of Congress bouncing up and down as if they were a video game avatar. They should continue to do more of that. It seems to be incredibly effective. Nothing the Democrats appear to be doing seems to be effective right now.
Morning Wire
The DOGE Data: Musk Slashes Billions in Government Waste | 3.15.25
They've gone so far as to suggest that the biggest thing that the Doge cuts are doing is hurting veterans. It's 2025, John, and Democrats are now very concerned about the plight of veterans in the federal government. 30% of civil service employees are veterans and many have lost jobs.
Morning Wire
The DOGE Data: Musk Slashes Billions in Government Waste | 3.15.25
And the Trump administration is the line you will read in a number of mainstream media reporting accounts of what's happening here. And the reality is, is that whomever the background is of the people that work for the federal government, at the end of the day, everything that's being done in the name of cutting spending is being identified and posted on the Doge website.
Morning Wire
The DOGE Data: Musk Slashes Billions in Government Waste | 3.15.25
And then you have conversations. And at the end of the day, we live in a democracy. And so people have a chance to see what it is and decide for themselves because you're now seeing local media reporting doing the work of saying, listen, these are cuts that are a result of what's happened to the federal government. And if people decide that that's hitting too close to home, then I think you'll see
Morning Wire
The DOGE Data: Musk Slashes Billions in Government Waste | 3.15.25
public effort coming the other way, organic grassroots pushback on this. And then we'll see if their elected representatives are responsive to that or not. That's how it's supposed to work. And I think that's where the conversation is today.
Morning Wire
The DOGE Data: Musk Slashes Billions in Government Waste | 3.15.25
Yeah, I I totally agree, John. In fact, I plan on sending you an email when we're done with this interview asking, what are the five things you think you accomplished during this conversation? Oh, yeah. So I look forward to your response.
Morning Wire
The DOGE Data: Musk Slashes Billions in Government Waste | 3.15.25
can amount to almost a half a billion dollars. They've identified things like software licenses with at least a couple of agencies where you have twice as many software licenses, I think 37,000 WinZip licenses in the General Services Administration. for 13,000 employees. So the examples like that are quite obvious.