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TRUMP AND MUSK HUNT FOR CORRUPTION, VERY SELECTIVELY  
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Peter Baker
February 12, 2025
New York Times
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_ Spending that the White House does not like is being labeled
fraudulent. At the same time, President Trump is rolling back
anticorruption efforts and ethical standards for himself and allies
like Elon Musk. _

President Trump and Elon Musk say they are rooting out waste, fraud
and abuse from all corners of the federal government.Credit..., Eric
Lee/The New York Times Peter Baker

 

Now that he is back in office, President Trump sees corruption
everywhere — in the foreign aid agency, at the Justice Department,
in federal contracting. But when it comes to his own orbit, he
doesn’t seem interested in looking.

In this second incarnation as president, Mr. Trump is presenting
himself as a born-again corruption fighter rooting out waste, fraud
and abuse from all corners of the federal government — even as he
is dismantling the government’s mechanisms
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fighting corruption, as it has been traditionally defined.

The president is boasting that he and Elon Musk, his partner in the
efficiency drive, have found “billions and billions of dollars”
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corrupt spending, although they have yet to provide evidence.

At the same time, his administration is dropping corruption cases
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political figures with ties to him, firing inspectors general
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actually search for abuse and pledging not to enforce a signature
anti-corruption law
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major corporations.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk are making accusations of corruption in the
government ranks even as they ask voters to trust that they are not
taking advantage of their own positions despite an extensive array
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of interest
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what any president or presidential adviser has had in modern times.

Dispensing with traditional ethics standards, both men are maintaining
control of their private companies, which could benefit from actions
by the government they oversee.

“I campaigned on the fact that I said that government is corrupt —
and it is corrupt,” Mr. Trump said during an appearance this week
with Mr. Musk in the Oval Office.

“I see a lot of kickback here,” he continued, without offering any
concrete examples. “Tremendous kickback. Because no one could be so
stupid to give out some of these contracts, so it must be
kickbacks.”

He added: “When you get down to it, it’s probably going to be
close to a trillion dollars.”

Mr. Trump often pulls numbers out of thin air and makes sweeping
claims without regard to factual foundations. Likewise, Mr. Trump, the
first felon ever elected president, regularly accuses anyone he
disfavors of corruption and even criminality without proof. He cites
conspiracy theories or distorted assertions to allege misconduct even
after they have been debunked.

In his newfound drive against abuse in federal spending, he appears
driven in large part by his self-declared war on the “deep state,”
as he terms the bureaucracy, convinced that it sought to thwart his
goals in his first term and set him up for multiple prosecutions
during his four-year hiatus from the White House.

To the extent that Mr. Trump’s aides have identified objectionable
spending in federal enclaves like the U.S. Agency for International
Development
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they are often rooted in policies he disagrees with rather than
examples of dishonesty and graft. And his aides have at times
misconstrued or misrepresented the details of what they have singled
out.

 

The facade of U.S.A.I.D. headquarters in Washington after the
agency’s name was removed and its logo covered up. Mr. Trump has
been targeting federal entities like U.S.A.I.D. that often have
policies he disagrees with rather than examples of dishonesty and
graft.Credit...Mandel Ngan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Mr. Trump and his allies, for instance, confused ordinary
subscription fees
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to news outlets with federal aid grants, leading the president to
falsely assert that the government had given money “to the fake news
media as a ‘payoff’ for creating good stories
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the Democrats.”

Similarly, five of eight examples of purportedly misguided spending
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U.S.A.I.D. cited by the White House press secretary were not actually
expenditures by that agency, or were described misleadingly. None of
them, as presented at least, involved theft or criminality, just
priorities that Mr. Trump opposes.

“Nothing that they have identified via the DOGE social media posts
is, to my knowledge, evidence of fraud or corruption,” said Jessica
Tillipman, an associate dean at George Washington Law School and a
specialist on government contracting. She was referring to Mr.
Musk’s team, which calls itself the Department of Government
Efficiency.

“Fraud and corruption are illegal and what DOGE has identified so
far are payments that this administration disagrees with or views as
wasteful, which are not illegal,” she added. “Calling these things
fraudulent or corrupt misrepresents what they are finding.”

During their Oval Office comments on Tuesday, Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk
made vague and sensational claims that were hard to verify. Mr. Musk
said his team had discovered that the federal government had sent out
“a massive number of blank checks” and that “known fraudsters”
were being paid. He said Social Security checks were going to people
whose dates of birth would indicate that they were as old as 150.
“We found fraud and abuse, I would use those two words,” he said.

Cryptically, he said that there were people working for the federal
government who were accruing tens of millions of dollars while on the
payroll. “Mysteriously, they get wealthy,” he said. “We don’t
know why. Where does it come from? I think the reality is they’re
getting wealthy at taxpayers’ expense. That’s the honest truth of
it.”

But he did not offer any documentation to back up his assertion. A
former inspector general from a previous administration, who asked not
to be identified for fear of retaliation, said Mr. Musk simply had not
had enough time to learn how agencies work and may be simply
misunderstanding what he has seen in data searches.

Mr. Musk’s claims have excited longstanding critics of government
who have long been disappointed by past efforts to weed out waste and
fraud. Even if all of the details are still to be worked out, they
said, at least someone at last is fearlessly scouring the federal
government for improper spending.

“As someone who has been advocating for limited government for my
entire professional life, I always instinctively knew that there was
some level of graft and corruption,” Rick Manning, president of
Americans for Limited Government, wrote this week. “But the level
being revealed in just a short amount of time and the elaborate
networks to hide it are absolutely stunning.”

 

[Elon Musk standing and speaking in the Oval Office. He is wearing a
black coat and a black “Make America Great Again” cap.]

Mr. Musk continues to own and run multiple companies that receive
billions of dollars in contracts from the federal government and are
the subject of multiple government reviews and
investigations. Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times

There is no doubt that fraud and waste can be found in any large
organization, especially one that spends $6 trillion a year like the
federal government does. The Government Accountability
Office estimated last year
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government loses between $233 billion and $521 billion a year to
fraud, based on data from fiscal years 2018 through 2022.

Additionally, the G.A.O. said that federal agencies had reported
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billion in improper payments in the 2023 fiscal year and estimated
that the government had made about $2.7 trillion in such payments over
the previous 20 years. Such payments rose during Mr. Trump’s last
stretch as president, from $144.4 billion in 2016, before he took
office, to $206.4 billion in 2020, the final year of his first term,
when pandemic aid programs led to a surge in fraudulent claims.

Mr. Trump’s interest in fighting corruption is selective.

In a little over three weeks in office, Mr. Trump’s Justice
Department has dropped a case
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former Representative Jeffrey Fortenberry of Nebraska, who was charged
with lying to the F.B.I. in an investigation of illegal campaign
donations, and federal prosecutors withdrew from a campaign finance
investigation
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Representative Andy Ogles, Republican of Tennessee, leaving the future
of the case uncertain.

Just this week, the department also moved to drop bribery charges
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Mayor Eric Adams of New York, who has cozied up to Mr. Trump since the
election. Mr. Trump pardoned former Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich
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Illinois, who was convicted of a scheme to sell an appointment to the
U.S. Senate.

The president has nominated Charles Kushner
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the father of his son-in-law Jared Kushner, to be ambassador to France
despite a conviction for tax evasion and witness retaliation. (Mr.
Trump commuted Mr. Blagojevich’s sentence and pardoned Mr. Kushner
in his first term.)

The re-elected president also fired as many as 17 inspectors general
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around the government, purging the very officials whose mission is to
uncover the kind of waste and abuse that Mr. Trump says he is out to
eradicate. In so doing, he defied the provisions of law governing the
dismissal of such inspectors, prompting a lawsuit Wednesday
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some of those who were fired.

He has also fired the heads of the Office of Government Ethics and the
Office of Special Counsel, two watchdog agencies that vexed his team
during his first term by pursuing allegations of misconduct.

And on Monday, Mr. Trump signed an order directing the Justice
Department to stop enforcing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act
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a law that bars bribing foreign government officials to secure
overseas business deals, arguing that such prosecutions make it harder
for American firms to compete against international rivals.

“There is great irony with respect to their regular complaints about
corruption while taking all of these extraordinary actions that
undermine U.S. anti-corruption efforts,” said Ms. Tillipman, who has
taught about anti-corruption efforts in government procurement for
nearly two decades.

In their zeal to ferret out corruption and restore trust in
government, Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk have expressed no concern about the
impact of their own decisions. Mr. Trump maintains his real estate and
promotional ventures that profit off his celebrity and appeal to
potential business partners eager to curry favor with the president of
the United States. A cryptocurrency venture he set up days before the
inauguration has already steered $100 million in trading fees
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his family and partners in the past month.

Mr. Musk continues to own and run multiple companies that receive
billions of dollars
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contracts from the federal government and are the subject of multiple
government reviews and investigations. Even if he does not involve
himself directly, the officials who make the decisions have seen that
government officials who cross Mr. Trump or Mr. Musk in recent weeks
have been put on leave or fired.

A White House official said this week that Mr. Musk, who is designated
an unpaid “special government employee,” planned to file a
financial disclosure report, but that it would remain confidential
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as he has vowed to be transparent about his activities.

Asked on Wednesday if Mr. Trump had signed a conflict-of-interest
waiver for Mr. Musk and if the White House would release it, Karoline
Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said she was unfamiliar with
the law that makes it a crime for government workers to touch an
official matter that affects their personal interests without a
waiver, and did not address whether Mr. Musk had received one.

“Both Donald Trump and Elon Musk have massive potential conflicts of
interest themselves and appear to be doing little or nothing to avoid
those,” said Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for
Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog group, and a
former federal corruption prosecutor. “For them to be up there
talking about taking steps in the interest of reducing waste, fraud
and abuse, it is quite simply disingenuous.

“If they want to cut government spending because that’s what they
believe is the right thing to do as a policy matter, then we have
processes to do that,” Mr. Bookbinder added. “They can work with
Congress. This seems like a pretext at best.”

_Maggie Haberman contributed reporting._

_Peter Baker [[link removed]] is the chief
White House correspondent for The Times. He is covering his sixth 
presidency and sometimes writes analytical pieces that place
presidents and their administrations in a larger context and
historical framework._

 

* Trump
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* Elon Musk
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* fraud
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