President Donald Trump praised billionaire Elon Musk’s team at the Department of Government Efficiency for ensuring that federal agencies are acting in accordance with Trump’s flurry of executive orders.

Trump and Musk sat for a wide-ranging joint interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity that his eponymous show broadcast Tuesday night. The president and his confidante spoke about their personal relationship and the impact that Musk’s DOGE engineers are having at the beginning of the Trump administration.

“I respect him. I always respected him. I never knew that he was right on certain things,” Trump said, before praising Musk’s Starlink internet communication system for helping victims of Hurricane Helene in North Carolina.

“I wanted somebody really smart to work with me in terms of the country,” Trump continued. Trump explained that in the past, he would sign executive orders as president, but people inside the federal agencies would not implement them.

“You write a beautiful [executive order] and you sign it and you assume it’s going to be done, but it’s not. What [Musk] does is he takes it, and with his hundred genuises — he’s got some very brilliant young people working for him that dress much worse than him — he gets it done; he’s a leader,” Trump said.

Earlier in the interview, Musk cited the example of DOGE identifying the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s spending on housing illegal immigrants in hotels. The Department of Homeland Security fired four FEMA staffers last week shortly after Musk revealed that FEMA recently spent roughly $59 million on housing migrants, contrary to Trump’s hard-line approach to illegal immigration. New York City plans to sue the Trump administration over the withdrawn funds after DHS clawed them back.

Trump later said he tried finding somebody smarter than Musk to run DOGE and could not do it, a quip that drew laughs from Trump and Musk.

“You know, I wanted to find somebody smarter than him. I searched all over. I just couldn’t do it,” Trump told Hannity.

“I couldn’t find anyone smarter,” Trump said as he patted Musk’s arm. “So we settled on this guy.”

Trump has empowered Musk’s DOGE to identify sweeping budgetary cuts across the federal bureaucracy as the department’s group of engineers seeks to root out waste, fraud, and abuse. DOGE’s primary target so far has been the U.S. Agency for International Development because of its spending on left-wing causes worldwide and track record of waste.

DOGE staffers are also going into the Treasury Department and other agencies to identify needless spending and administrative bloat. Trump has said that DOGE will be looking into the Department of Defense’s budget, with the Pentagon having failed seven consecutive audits.

A group of Democratic states attempted to prevent DOGE from laying off federal workers and accessing sensitive data, but D.C. federal judge Tanya Chutkan denied their bid to temporarily weaken DOGE’s authority.