Either children are getting a major head start on their careers or something fishy is going on at the Small Business Administration (SBA), according to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Elon Musk and his team at DOGE have already exposed how millions — and even billions — of taxpayer dollars have been siphoned off to bankroll LGBT agendas, abortion advocacy, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. But DOGE’s latest find is a real head-scratcher: over $300 million in SBA loans have been handed out to children under 11 years old.

“A case of fraud was with the [SBA], where they were handing out loans — $330 million worth of loans to people under the age of 11,” Musk said during a Monday cabinet meeting at the White House. “I think the youngest, Kelly, was a nine-month-old who got a $100,000 loan. That’s a very precocious baby we’re talking about here.” How a nine-month-old secured $100,000 without raising red flags until now remains mysterious, but DOGE’s new rules aim to stop it from happening going forward. In a post on X, DOGE wrote that from now on, the SBA would require “date of birth collection for all direct loan applications” and pause “the direct loan process for those under 18 and above 120 years old.”

“Basic sanity checks like these are initial steps towards minimizing fraud in government payment programs,” the department wrote. This news comes after DOGE already discovered millions of people over the age of 120 still marked as alive in the Social Security database. In fact, earlier today, the department posted on X, “For the past 3 weeks,

@SocialSecurity has been executing a major cleanup of their records. Approximately 7 million number holders, all listed age 120+, have now been marked as deceased. Another ~5 million to go.” Musk emphasized in his own post: “No more loans to babies or people too old to be alive.”

Fox News reported in greater detail that “nearly 5,600 loans … were issued in 2020 and 2021 — while the world struggled with the COVID-19 pandemic — and it is unclear what they were used for.” DOGE had stated in response that “while it is possible to have business arrangements where this is legal, that is highly unlikely for these 5,593 loans, as they all also used an SSN with the incorrect name” — again suggesting widespread identity fraud rather than a sudden boom in toddler entrepreneurs. President Donald Trump referred to this as nothing short of “a pure fraud,” adding, “we would like to use the words waste and abuse.”

According to Fox, DOGE noted that they are working alongside SBA “to solve this problem this week.” But in addition to the SBA money waste, DOGE continues to find waste within the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). In fact, also during Monday’s Cabinet meeting, USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins explained how they “canceled a $300,000 contract educating on food justice for queer and transgender farmers in San Francisco.” Rollins added, “A similar contract we canceled in New York — again, educating transgender and queer farmers on food justice and food equality. I’m not even sure what that means, but apparently, the last administration wanted to put our taxpayer dollars towards that.”

DOGE’s website is keeping track of the roughly 7,351 contracts they’ve terminated thus far, as well as putting a spotlight on the current “$22B in savings” they’ve achieved — with rising numbers every week. As of March 24, the site reads: “We are working to upload all of our receipts in a digestible and transparent manner consistent with applicable rules and regulations. To get started, listed below are a subset of contract, grant, and lease cancellations, representing ~30% of total savings.”

In a comment to The Washington Stand, Family Research Council’s Meg Kilgannon asked, “At what point does it all become waste, fraud, and abuse?” Ultimately, she continued, “Our nation has a spending problem. We see the symptoms of it in revelations like this one” involving the SBA grants, “which give new meaning to the terms ‘funny money’ and ‘stupid money.’”

At the end of the day, Kilgannon argued, “DOGE is giving Congress plenty of reasons to cut spending in general, beyond just waste, fraud and abuse.” Echoing this sentiment, Jody Hice, president of FRC Action, told TWS, “DOGE is doing yeoman’s work when it comes to finding wasteful spending of hard-earned taxpayer money. They are literally finding billions of dollars of waste and/or funds that have been inappropriately spent.”

“Without a doubt,” he concluded, “it is the task of government to be prudent with taxpayer money, and the fact that anyone would oppose the effort to stop such waste is beyond belief.”