Tech billionaire Elon Musk said he is thinking of auditing the US Federal Reserve, after calling for greater scrutiny of the central bank in the past.
He made the comment on Thursday at the Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland, while wielding a chainsaw to illustrate his drastic policies slashing government spending.
The chainsaw was a gift from Argentina’s libertarian President Javier Milei.
“This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy,” said Musk, holding the power tool aloft as a stage prop to symbolize the drastic slashing of government jobs.
Musk’s cost-cutting program under the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has swept through federal agencies since Donald Trump began his second term as president last month.
Musk was Trump’s biggest campaign donor.
Under Musk-led job cuts, Trump has targeted bank regulators, forest workers, rocket scientists, and tens of thousands of other government employees.
Musk’s DOGE team has also cancelled contracts worth about $8.5 billion involving foreign aid, diversity training, and other initiatives that Trump has opposed.
Both men have set a goal of cutting at least $1 trillion from the $6.7 trillion federal budget, though Donald Trump has said he will not touch popular benefits programs that make up roughly one-third of that total.
The White House has not said how many of the nation’s 2.3 million civil-service workers it wants to fire or given any numbers on the mass layoffs. Roughly 75,000 took a buyout offer last week.
On Thursday, over 6,000 employees at the US Internal Revenue Service were told they would be fired, eliminating roughly 6 per cent of the agency’s workforce in the midst of the busy tax-filing season.
According to a Reuters report citing a person familiar with the matter, the layoffs are expected to total 6,700 and largely target workers at the agency hired as part of an expansion under Democratic President Joe Biden, who had sought to expand enforcement efforts on wealthy taxpayers.
