Sales force (RCMP) CEO Marc Benioff is known to throw some compliments at Tesla (TSLA) CEO and fellow billionaire Elon Musk on X.
The SaaS specialist says Musk has a real chance to clean up government waste thanks to DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency), a new department proposed by the new Trump administration.
“I think it’s crucial for us,” Benioff said on Yahoo Finance (video above). “We need to get to a balanced budget faster. This needs to be a bipartisan issue. It’s not a Republican or Democratic issue. It’s an issue that hasn’t been as strongly embraced by recent presidents.”
“The last (president to focus on the budget) was in the George W. Bush administration, where I was actively involved. I was chairman of the president’s IT advisory committee. We were very focused on creating “a fiscally neutral environment, a balanced fiscal environment,” added the co-founder of Salesforce.
A neutral mindset when it comes to budgeting would be nice, because the alternative is getting uglier by the day.
The U.S. budget deficit reached $1.83 trillion in fiscal 2024, the highest amount outside of the COVID-19 period. Interest on the federal debt exceeded $1 trillion for the first time.
The deficit increased by 8% from the previous year, or $138 billion. This level constitutes the third highest federal deficit in U.S. history.
Enter DOGE.
The president-elect’s new department holds a bit of that Musk/Trump folklore because of its acronym and the ticker for dogecoin (DOGE-USD) are the same.
Trump announced his intention to create a department that would “eliminate fraud and improper payments” with a six-month deadline to complete the tasks. DOGE leaders are Musk and a businessman and Trump loyalist Vivek Ramaswamy.
Musk has said nearly $2 trillion in costs could be taken away from the government, although critics question whether this level of cost reduction is possible without disrupting benefits to the government. Social Security and Medicare.
“Massive waste of health spending” Musk recently posted on.
Not surprisingly, Benioff believes that new technologies, such as AI digital agents, could help reduce government costs.
“We already have relationships with many government agencies. We’re already talking with them about how to integrate this technology to create more efficient agencies. And we want to continue to have even more conversations, not just with the U.S. government.” , but every government that we have relationships with around the world, really every business, needs to adopt this technology,” Benioff said.