Salesforce (CRM) CEO Marc Benioff has been known to throw out a few compliments to Tesla (TSLA) CEO and fellow billionaire Elon Musk on X.
The SaaS maven says Musk has a real shot at cleaning up government waste by way of DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency), a new department proposed by the incoming Trump administration.
“I think this is critical for us. We have to get to a balanced budget faster. This must be a bipartisan issue. This is not a Republican or Democratic issue. It’s an issue that has not been as strongly embraced by the last several presidents,” Benioff said on Yahoo Finance (video above).
“The last one [president to focus on the budget] was in the George W. Bush administration where I had an active participation. I was the chairman of the President’s IT advisory committee. We were very focused on delivering a budget neutral environment, a balanced budget environment,” the Salesforce cofounder added.
A budget neutral mindset would be nice as the alternative is getting uglier by the day.
The US budget deficit swelled to $1.833 trillion in fiscal year 2024, the highest amount outside of the COVID-19 period. Interest on federal debt exceeded $1 trillion for the first time.
The deficit last rose 8% from the prior year, or $138 billion. The level marked the third highest federal deficit in US history.
Enter DOGE.
The president-elect’s new department holds a bit of that Musk/Trump folklore because its acronym and the ticker for dogecoin (DOGE-USD) are the same.
Trump has shared plans to create a department that would “eliminate fraud and improper payments” with a six month timeline to complete the tasks. The leaders of DOGE are Musk and businessman and Trump loyalist Vivek Ramaswamy.
Musk has said close to $2 trillion in costs could be stripped out of government, though critics have disputed whether that level of cost-cutting is possible without disrupting benefits to Social Security and Medicare.
“Massive waste in healthcare spending,” Musk recently posted on X.
Unsurprisingly, Benioff believes new technology such as AI digital agents could help cut costs in government.
“We already have relationships with a lot of government agencies. We’re already talking to them about how to bring this technology in to create more efficient agencies. And we want to continue to have even more conversations, not just with the US government, but all the governments that we have relationships within the world, really all companies. Everybody needs to embrace this technology,” Benioff said.
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