In a candid moment following a tense Cabinet meeting, Vice President J.D. Vance admitted that Elon Musk has made "mistakes" regarding the federal layoffs within the federal government. Vance acknowledged that while Musk's bold moves have disrupted and exposed the wasteful spending and fraud in Washington, some of his decisions during the mass layoffs could have been handled differently.
On Friday, during an interview with NBC News, Vance acknowledged that Musk may have gotten ahead of himself when carrying out mass layoffs of federal employees. However, Vance said that the firings were necessary.
“Elon himself has said that sometimes you do something, you make a mistake, and then you undo the mistake. I’m accepting of mistakes,” Vance said. “I also think you have to quickly correct those mistakes. But I’m also very aware of the fact that there are a lot of good people who work in the government — a lot of people who are doing a very good job. And we want to try to preserve as much of what works in government as possible while eliminating what doesn’t work.”
Musk, leading President Donald Trump’s efforts to shrink the federal government’s spending expenditures, has defended the massive cuts, saying that many federal employees were paid to do little to no work.
The Tesla CEO also recently referred to certain federal workers as "fraudsters," questioning their ability to perform their duties effectively.
When asked about his comments, Vance said that he believes “some people clearly are collecting a check and not doing a job. Now, how many people is that? I don’t know, in a three million-strong federal workforce, whether it’s a few thousand or much larger than that.”
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“However big the problem is, it is a problem when people are living off the generosity of the American taxpayer in a civil service job and not doing the people’s business,” Vance said. “That doesn’t distract or detract from the fact that you do have a lot of great civil servants who are doing important work. But I think most of those great civil servants would say we want to be empowered to do our job. We don’t want the person who doesn’t show up five days a week to make it harder for us to do what we need to do.”
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