Democrats either cannot—or choose not to—consider the numbers or the impact on humans when discussing energy.   For the Trump Administration, energy policy is about improving people’s lives using math and common sense.

Elon Musk stood in the Oval Office on February 11, 2025, with his son beside him, and told the country what his team had found inside the federal payment system. "You've got comment fields that are also blank, so you don't know why the payment was made." He described a do-not-pay list that "can take up to a year" for known fraudsters to get onto, and then said "even what's on the list, the list is not used." In the same room he explained that federal retirement paperwork was still processed by hand and stored in a limestone mine in Pennsylvania. "The limiting factor is the speed at which the mine shaft elevator can move determines how many people can retire from the federal government." He also raised the Social Security records with no date of death, people listed at 150 years old. The agency's own inspector general had flagged millions of these records years earlier, and SSA had passed on fixing them. After Elon Musk made it public, Social Security started a cleanup, and by late April DOGE reported about 11 million numberholders listed at 120 and older marked deceased. Days after he spoke, DOGE reported that Treasury had made the account code field mandatory on payments. The price was paid by him and by people who never signed up for politics. Tesla dealerships were firebombed and shot at. Owners had their names and addresses posted online. At a Wisconsin town hall on March 31 he said his security team told him death threats had "gone down from 18,000 to 17,000." He told Bret Baier that the man who firebombs a dealership is not the real problem: "It's the people pushing the propaganda that cause that guy to do it." The legacy media spent those months treating every finding as a scandal about Elon Musk instead of a scandal about the government. He could have stayed in Texas building rockets and cars. He took 130 days of this anyway, and on May 30 he walked out of the Oval Office saying "this is not the end of DOGE but really the beginning."