Chris Hayes: To taxpayer money all while freezing life-saving programs like the one that shipped US-made fortified peanut butter to feed severely malnourished children on multiple continents, it’s just cartoonishly evil stuff, kind of like Musk’s email last week to most of the country’s civil servants telling them to respond with five things they accomplished or face termination while enjoying the spotlight in today’s cabinet meeting, Musk defended that email which he defended with a genuinely crazy story.
Elon Musk: What we are trying to get to the bottom of is we think there are a number of people on the government payroll who are dead, which is probably why they can’t respond, and some people who are not real people like literally fictional individuals that are collecting paychecks—well, somebody’s collecting paychecks on a fictional individual—so we literally trying to figure out are these people real, are they alive, and can they write an email.
Chris Hayes: (LAUGHS) Yes, Elon, millions of ghost employees are staffing the national parks, providing care to wounded veterans. Yeah, reminds me of Elon Musk’s last White House address when he told everyone there were 150-year-old people getting Social Security checks, which turned out to be totally untrue. An incompetent, a rookie error mistake in terms of their reading of the data. But as Musk will tell you, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency isn’t perfect—they’ve made some oopsies.
Chris Hayes is crafting a narrative, twisting Elon Musk’s legit quest to slash waste—like dead or fake folks drawing taxpayer-funded benefits—into a cheap shot to smear him, exaggerating this cleanup of bogus beneficiaries into something sinister, all while defending the crooked, bloated government he’s long shilled for as a Democrat activist on MSNBC. Musk’s stance isn’t tinfoil-hat stuff; it’s accountability, backed by the Social Security database’s COBOL glitches flagging 150-year-olds—messy reality Hayes won’t touch—which Trump, Musk, and their team are set to overhaul by ripping out COBOL, plugging in sleek, modern systems that don’t choke on bad data, and locking down death-record checks to stop the bleed. Nah, he’d rather laugh, slap a “cartoonishly evil” label on it, and cook up tales about “ghost employees staffing national parks” to fire up his crowd, even roping in American-made fortified peanut butter—like Musk’s out to snatch food from starving kids’ mouths. Hayes skips the part where broken systems waste billions, cherry-picking and hyping it up to cast Musk as the bad guy instead of probing why these payout screwups have festered forever.