Comedian Bill Maher expressed cautious optimism on Wednesday about President-elect Donald Trump’s upcoming administration because of billionaire Elon Musk’s role as co-chair of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
After Trump’s election victory, he tapped Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to co-chair DOGE, which will partner with the White House Office of Management and Budget to implement sweeping government reforms. Maher, on “The Stephen A. Smith Show,” argued that America’s government is in desperate need of reform and praised Musk’s initial statements about the changes he plans to bring.
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“It’s not like this country does not need some sort of clean sweeping. Now, I don’t know what that’s going to be. I’ve said this before: this country needs a colonic. I would not have chosen Donald Trump to be the doctor to administer that colonic,” Maher said. “But I’m curious to see, for example, what Elon Musk is going to do. I’m curious to see how influential he’s going to be. He is tasked with reinventing the government, basically. He said some things which I think are great and I’m on the page with.”
“The first thing he said was, ‘We’re going to ask everybody in the government who has been staying home — and that’s been a lot of people since the pandemic — to come back to work,” he continued. And we expect about 20% of the workforce to then just quit, and we welcome that.’ And I thought, yeah, that’s probably okay because if 20% of the government workforce quit, would we notice the difference? I’m guessing we probably wouldn’t.”
Musk and Ramaswamy advocated in a November Wall Street Journal opinion piece for relocating federal agencies out of Washington, D.C., and encouraging voluntary resignations from remote workers unwilling to return to the office full-time. They argued that working from home is a “Covid-era privilege” that American taxpayers should no longer be expected to fund.
“He also said he was going to go after the F-35. Okay, perfect. That’s exactly the kind of thing we should do,” Maher said. “This is a fighter jet that they’ve been funding to the tune of like a trillion dollars, and he said, ‘First of all, it’s obsolete. We don’t use fighter jets anymore. We won’t in the very near future. They’re just going to get pilots killed, and we have drones now. So why are we spending a trillion dollars on something we don’t need?’ So if that’s what’s going to go on in the government, I’m all for it.”
DOGE will focus on cutting regulations, reducing administrative overhead and achieving cost savings, according to Musk and Ramaswamy’s WSJ opinion piece.
“I would be curious to see what he’s going to do because, again, America — it’s not like it’s not completely bloated. It is, and it’s gotten out of hand,” the comedian added. “And somebody needs to go in there and do what he proposes to do. But we’ll see in execution. Everything is in the details.”
Maher also condemned Musk for how he has run his social media platform X, accusing the billionaire of making it “a place for the right.” He also said Musk promotes “crazy kind of far-right people” on the platform without doing research.
However, he praised Musk for developing Tesla, Neuralink, Starlink and SpaceX.
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Republished with permission from Daily Caller News Foundation
