House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had cracked the code and is in the “belly of the beast of bureaucracy.”

Host Dana Bash said, “You met this past week with Elon Musk for several hours, I believe, on the White House complex. Did you talk to him about when you pass the bill to keep the government running, when at least you hope it will, you will do so that you will include cuts in that that mirror what he is trying to do, big cuts in some cases almost eliminating agencies?”

Johnson said, “He’s shown me many of the examples of the outrageous abuses. And I’m telling you, Dana, when the American people understand what has been happening with our taxpayer dollars, that Congress has been unable to discern, even with our best oversight efforts, Elon has been able to crack the code. He’s inside the belly of the beast of the bureaucracy, and the algorithms are crawling through the data.”

He added, “What you’re going to see is a very a very careful attention paid to ensuring that the essential programs of the federal government, the things that make sense to American taxpayers and it follow common sense, will be sustained and supported and funded, but that the the fraud, waste and abuse will not. Elon himself has acknowledged there is no playbook for what’s happening right now. This has never been done before and that’s kind of the point. It’s why it’s so exciting. He understands that some mistakes will be made along the way, but they’ll be immediately corrected. And you you’ve seen that, for example, with USAID there were enormous abuses there that enraged the American people but at the secretary of state, under Marco Rubio’s leadership, they’re going through literally with a with a line by line on the the line items of USAID and they’re giving waivers for the programs that do need to be continued.”

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