Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) head Elon Musk promised to cut $1 trillion from the annual budget deficit by identifying waste and fraud in federal spending on Tuesday, with DOGE officials reportedly identifying almost $900 million to cut from the Department of Education (DOE) programs as part of their latest push for taxpayer spending reform.

The Associated Press reported Tuesday that DOGE “had terminated 89 contracts worth $881 million” at the DOE, including $101 million in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training. The cuts come in the wake of the latest Nation’s Report Card, which found that students in the U.S. are continuing to fall behind in basic skills despite massive DOE spending. As noted by former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, the DOE has sent over $1 trillion to schools over the last four decades “with the express purpose of closing the gaps between the highest and lowest performers.” However, the latest report card revealed that “in reading and math, most students were even further behind than they were in 2022. Which was worse than where they were in 2019. Which was worse than 2013.”

Overall, the White House has so far approved $3.4 billion in federal spending cuts recommended by DOGE, according to The Epoch Times. According to an unofficial tracking website, DOGE has so far identified a total of $37.69 billion in possible spending cuts.

During a joint press conference with Musk and President Donald Trump in the Oval Office on Tuesday, the tech billionaire detailed some of what his team is finding, including a lack of “basic controls” within the Department of the Treasury.

“[B]asic controls that should be in place, that are in place in any company, such as making sure that any given payment has a payment categorization code, that there is a comment field that describes the payment, and that if a payment is on the ‘do not pay’ list, that you don’t actually pay it — none of those things are true currently,” he explained. “So the reason that departments can’t pass audits is because the payments don’t have a categorization code. It’s like just a massive number of blank checks just flying out the building.”

Musk went on to describe various examples of fraudulent activity that DOGE is uncovering. “[T]here’s crazy things like just cross-examination of Social Security. We’ve got people in there that are 150 years old. … [T]hat’s a case where, like, I think they’re probably dead. … And then there’s a whole bunch of Social Security payments where there’s no identifying information. Well, why is there no identifying information? Obviously, we want to make sure that people who deserve to receive Social Security do receive it, and that they receive it quickly and accurately.”

Musk further highlighted the tangible effects that DOGE’s work to cut wasteful taxpayer spending could have on American citizens.

“[W]e can cut the budget deficit in half from $2 trillion to $1 [trillion], and then with deregulation — because there’s a lot of regulations that don’t ultimately serve the public good. We need to free the builders of America to build. And if we do that, [it] means … we can get the economic growth to be maybe 3, 4, maybe 5%. And that means if you can get a trillion dollars of economic growth and you cut the budget deficit by a trillion, between now and next year, there is no inflation. There’s no inflation in 2026. And if the government is not borrowing as much, it means that interest costs decline. So everyone’s mortgage, their car payment, their credit card bills, their student debt, the monthly payments drop.”

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill say Trump’s empowerment of Musk and DOGE to target wasteful taxpayer spending is the mandate that voters gave the president in November.

“[W]hat Elon Musk is doing at DOGE I think is incredibly important,” said Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) during Tuesday’s “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins.” “He’s very much embodying the Silicon Valley ethos of ‘move fast and break things,’ and he is targeting and highlighting egregious waste and working to shut it down. … [A]t the end of the day, what President Trump is doing is following through on his mandate from the American people. … [Y]ou look at the spending we’re seeing, for example, in USAID, it is a wish list of left-wing groups that are being paid off, and they’re spending money: $2 million on sex changes in Guatemala; $8 million on teaching DEI in Serbia; $20 million on ‘Sesame Street’ in Iraq. It is an absolute abuse of government power. That’s what Elon and President Trump are taking on.”

Rep. Mark Harris (R-N.C.) concurred. “I’m not sure how it’s going to all play out in the end, but I do know this is a wake-up call, and DOGE is helping us do it,” he remarked on “Washington Watch” Tuesday. “Elon Musk [is] bringing leadership there. President Trump is doing what he told [the] American people he would do — promises made, promises kept. I’m excited. … I believe [this is] just [the] tip of the iceberg. … I think there’s more to come, and I think voters better stay tuned.”

In response to a wave of criticism from Democratic lawmakers claiming that Trump is unlawfully freezing federal spending that has already been appropriated by Congress, Cruz acknowledged that a legal battle will likely ensue over how far executive powers reach.

“[R]ight at the heart of this is a fundamental dispute about presidential power that is built into the Constitution, which is a longstanding power of the president that is called impoundment,” he explained. “Impoundment is when the chief executive declines to spend money that Congress has appropriated. Impoundments existed for a long time. The first president to exercise the impoundment power was Thomas Jefferson in 1801, and Republicans and Democrats have exercised the impoundment power for centuries. Now, Richard Nixon in the 1970s was very aggressive [in] exercising impoundment, and Congress passed a law that sought to rein in that power, and the Supreme Court upheld that law. I believe what the Trump administration is doing is engaging in a systematic litigation strategy to return the constitutional power of impoundment to the president.”

“Doing so would be very, very good for reining in the out-of-control spending we’re seeing,” Cruz concluded.