Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent praised the work the Department of Government Efficiency is doing and identified the key reason efforts to rein in the waste, fraud, and abuse within the federal government must happen so quickly.
“With DOGE, I am completely aligned with what Elon is doing. Everyone says, ‘Well, do you have to do it so fast? You have to do it,’” he said on the "All-In Podcast."
“I’ve only been in this business for seven weeks; I’ve only been in D.C. for eight weeks, but the thing I can tell you is, if you don’t move fast, the vested interests will weigh you down, like the quicksand will come up, or the claws,” Bessent explained. “Everybody’s got lobbyists, everybody’s got—I mean, think about it, within a 10-mile radius of here, 25 percent of the GDP of the U.S. pulsates through here every day, and everybody wants to just skim a little.”
He relayed a conversation he had with Musk about why people are so upset with him—“cause you’re moving their cheese,” he said. But the billionaire was quick to correct him—“it’s not their cheese; it’s the American people’s cheese.”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says the quiet part out loud. The resistance to Elon Musk’s DOGE in DC is because lobbyists want our tax money “to keep flowing into their pockets”
— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) March 22, 2025
“I am completely aligned with what Elon's doing”
Scott Bessent says if you don’t move as quickly… pic.twitter.com/1jOzwnsg0j
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"There is no winning in Elon’s role," host David Friedberg noted. "Every single time he takes action, there are people that are going to come after him, that are going to come after the administration. Obviously, it gets recast, reclassified in the media as being something different, but there’s nothing but downside as you make these changes to individual organizations that participate, and then it takes a while for the flow of that money to find its way, or those individuals to find their way back into the productive private economy. That’s where I think there’s a big gap and a big challenge in the perception of the actions that are going on with the changes right now. Everyone sees the cuts, but they don’t see the benefits, and that’s nine months, 12 months, 15 months down the road, and that’s a really hard thing to reconcile for most."
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