Bessent sat down with Fox News for an extended interview that aired on Tuesday evening, discussing DOGE and other topics.
“So that’s a very good start,” Bessent said of the cuts, adding that DOGE’s efforts could eventually lead to “several percent of GDP that we are saving.”
DOGE leader Elon Musk said the group could cut “the budget deficit in half from $2 trillion to one” last week and that if they made the cuts, “there is no inflation.”
“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, any — their student debt, their monthly payments drop. That’s a fantastic scenario for the average American,” he said.
Bessent also said that citizens “don’t have to be concerned” about the DOGE team’s attempt at accessing taxpayer data. He said one person at the IRS “is looking at an outdated IT system, that’s all they’re doing.”
Bessent said two workers had “read-only access” to the payments systems, access that doesn’t enable them to make changes. “There are very strict guardrails around them,” he said.
Congressional Democrats have been alarmed by the efforts.
“Despite Treasury’s denials, DOGE personnel had the ability to modify system coding and were planning to use the Treasury systems to help pause payments by other agencies,” a letter sent to Bessent and authored by Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Ron Wyden (D-OR), and Jack Reed (D-RI) dated Thursday said. “You need to provide a clear, complete, and public accounting of who accessed the systems, what they were doing, and why they were doing it.”
Bessent responded to some of the criticism by saying on Tuesday that “this kind of fearmongering doesn’t help anybody.”
“It tells me that people are worried that they’re part of the waste, fraud, and abuse,” he added.
The treasury secretary also touched on President Donald Trump’s recent foreign policy moves, arguing Trump’s Ukraine plan “could win the Nobel Peace Prize.” Bessent met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last week amid ceasefire talks with Russia, which have included the U.S.
Trump said on Tuesday, “I think I have the power to end the war.”
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Getting rid of the penny was also a topic of discussion in the interview, a venture the Treasury Department is actively pursuing, Bessent said.
“President Trump wants to make the penny extinct, that’s part of the cost savings. Costs about three cents to make one cent; even in Washington that math doesn’t work,” he said. “It’s going soon.”
