Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell pushed back Wednesday on billionaire Elon Musk’s claim the central bank is bloated when he was asked about it during a press conference.
Elon Musk, the leader of President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), wrote in a post on X last month, “The Fed is absurdly overstaffed.”
Powell was asked about those remarks by FOX Business’ Edward Lawrence at a press conference after the central bank’s announcement it would hold interest rates steady.
“We run a very careful budget process where we’re fully aware. We owe that to the public, and we believe we do that. I’ve got no further comment on that, thanks,” Powell responded.
FEDERAL RESERVE HOLDS INTEREST RATES STEADY AMID INFLATION UNCERTAINTY
Powell and the Fed have faced political criticism from Musk before.
In May 2024, Musk posted that the “Fed has a crazy high number of employees.”
The billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX also said last summer the Fed was too slow in cutting interest rates, writing on X in August that the Fed “needs to drop rates” and has been “foolish not to have done so already.”
ELON MUSK’S DOGE MAKES ANOTHER HIRING PUSH
The Fed cut interest rates at its meeting in September for the first time since March 2020 as inflation cooled from a 40-year high it reached in June 2022.
The central bank cut the benchmark federal funds rate by 50 basis points in September, followed by smaller 25-basis-point cuts in November and December, before pausing this month amid economic uncertainty.
DOGE, which President Donald Trump officially established via executive order upon his return to the White House last week, aims to slash government waste and provide increased transparency with government spending.
Some of the cuts proposed by Musk include simplifying the U.S. tax code, auditing the Pentagon, ending federal employees’ remote work, reevaluating expired congressional programs, modernizing IT systems and protecting federal healthcare and Social Security benefits, to name a few.
FOX Business’ Breck Dumas contributed to this report.
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