Vice President J.D. Vance said he knows billionaire Elon Musk has made mistakes at the helm of the Department of Government Efficiency and has to fix them.
Polls show most Americans back Mr. Musk as he leads President Trump’s DOGE. At the same time, the tech billionaire hears jeers from liberals, particularly for the thousands of federal workers who have been fired amid questions surrounding his methods as he roots around in the nooks and crannies of government.
Democratic lawmakers have tried to turn him into a unifying boogeyman while Republicans publicly heap him and DOGE with praise. One of the main points the GOP made in keeping the government open was to let Mr. Musk continue his dive into the federal bureaucracy.
Mr. Vance said in an interview with NBC News published on Friday that Mr. Musk has owned up to making mistakes in his quest to root out waste, fraud and abuse.
“I’m accepting of mistakes,” Mr. Vance said. “I also think you have to quickly correct those mistakes.”
He added, “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.”
Mr. Musk shared his mistakes, like canceling government contracts that were already canceled or mistakenly firing and rehiring federal workers across a variety of agencies, with congressional Republicans during a visit to Capitol Hill last week as the heat around his operations intensified.
Many of Mr. Musk’s suggestions as the leader of DOGE have landed the Trump administration in court.
A pair of federal judges this week ordered the White House to rehire thousands of probationary government workers who were fired as a result of the president’s hunt for waste, fraud and abuse.
Behind closed doors, Mr. Musk reportedly clashed with Secretary of State Marco Rubio over the latter’s unwillingness to fire more of his workforce, an office blowup that Mr. Trump said never happened.
Mr. Musk’s has called many of the fired employees “fraudsters.”
Mr. Vance tried to defend while taking a softer approach to Mr. Musk’s viewpoint.
“I think some people clearly are collecting a check and not doing a job,” Mr. Vance said. “Now, how many people is that? I don’t know, in a 3 million-strong federal workforce, whether it’s a few thousand or much larger than that.”
He continued, “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. 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.”
