President Trump’s senior adviser and tech billionaire Elon Musk, along with seven Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) staffers, defended the number of federal government employees the advisory board has moved to terminate in recent months, arguing that “almost no one has gotten fired.”
In a wide-ranging hour-long interview on Fox’s “Special Report” with Bret Baier, Musk, along with seven influential DOGE members, shared their view on what government efficiency could look like, vowed to accelerate modernizations of government systems and defended their work on the Social Security Administration, which the Democrats have repeatedly criticized them for.
Anthony Armstrong, a former Morgan Stanley banker, who is now working for DOGE at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), said during a Thursday interview that most workers have departed the government “largely through voluntary means.”
“There’s voluntary early retirement. There’s voluntary separation payments. We put in place deferred resignation, the eight-month severance program,” Armstrong said. “So, there’s a very heavy bias towards programs that are long-dated, that are generous, that allow people to exit and go and get a new job in the private sector.”
“And you’ve heard a lot of news about RIFs, about people getting fired. At this moment in time, less than 0.15, not 1.5, less than 0.15 of the federal workforce has actually been given a RIF [Reduction in Force] notice,” Armstrong told Baier.
Armstrong reiterated Trump’s line that DOGE’s work is a “scalpel, not [a] hatchet.”
“And that’s the way it’s getting done. And then, once those decisions are made, there’s a very heavy focus on being generous, being caring, being compassionate, and treating everyone with dignity and respect,” the DOGE member said on Thursday.
Musk then added that “basically, almost no one has gotten fired. That’s what we’re saying.”
DOGE’s push to overhaul the government, in the name of cutting costs, boosting efficiency and rooting out waste, has resulted in thousands of federal workers being laid off or being offered a buyout, although thousands have also been reinstated following orders from judges in court.
Apart from cutting employees, DOGE has also moved to dismantle government departments and agencies, looking to effectively dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), an agency responsible for dishing out humanitarian aid around the world. Earlier this month, a federal judge ruled that DOGE likely acted unconstitutionally in an attempt to shutter USAID.
“I think in the context of the government, we’re moving like lightning. In the context of what I’m used to moving, it’s slower than I’d like,” Musk said on Thursday. “So, what seems like incredibly fast action by government standards is it’s slower than I’d like, to be totally frank.”
