DOGE Chief Elon Musk says the organization is set to save the U.S. government more than $150 billion in cuts to waste and fraud in FY 2026.

Musk made the comment during a public Cabinet meeting with President Donald Trump on Thursday. 

‘We anticipate savings in FY 26 from reduction of waste and fraud by $150 billion. And, I mean, and some of it is just absurd. Like people getting unemployment insurance who haven’t been born yet,’ Musk said.

‘People ask me how are you going to find waste and fraud in a government? I’m like, well, actually, just go in any direction. That’s how you find it. It’s very common. It’s, as a military would say, a target-rich environment,’ he continued.

‘So, I think we’re doing a lot of good, and in excellent collaboration with the Cabinet, to achieve these savings. And it will actually result in better services for the American people. And then we’re going to be spending their tax dollars in a way that is sensible and fair and good,’ he added.

Thursday’s Cabinet meeting comes less than a day after DOGE announced the cancelation of 108 ‘wasteful contracts’ on Wednesday.

DOGE said the contacts had a ceiling value of $250 million and a savings of $70 million. 

The problem contracts included a $14,000 commitment by the Department of Health and Human Services for an ‘executive transformational leadership training program.’

Another was a $5.2 million contract with the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, the human resources agency for the federal government, to ‘provide strategic advisory and assistance to improve and transform current processes and organizational systems.’

A bipartisan duo of House lawmakers is moving to ensure the U.S. government is free from Chinese-made technology after President Donald Trump hiked tariffs against Beijing.

Rep. Pat Fallon, R-Texas, is leading the Securing America’s Federal Equipment (SAFE) Supply Chains Act alongside Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif.

It would impose new guardrails on the technology the U.S. government is able to purchase by forcing a federal agency or office to only purchase it from ‘original equipment manufacturers’ or ‘authorized resellers,’ according to the bill text obtained by Fox News Digital.

The bill targets U.S. government technology purchased through the ‘gray market,’ an alternative channel for purchasing and selling genuine goods without the authorization of the manufacturer.

Fallon said his bill ‘dovetails’ with Trump’s hawkish stance on China.

‘With the rising threat posed by Chinese aggression, not only in the Indo-Pacific, but here at home by means of artificial intelligence and cyberattacks, it’s critical that the Department of Defense secure its vital infrastructure,’ Fallon explained to Fox News Digital. 

‘In order to do so, we must ensure that the U.S. military only purchases electronic equipment from approved vendors that are free from adversarial, particularly [Chinese Communist Party], influence.’

He praised Trump’s ‘bold leadership’ in the U.S. ‘breaking its dependency on Communist China.’

‘The SAFE Supply Chains Act dovetails with this endeavor and is in the best interest of U.S. national security,’ he said.

The White House said Thursday it had imposed 145% in new tariffs on China, up from the 125% Trump announced the day before.

While hiking rates on China, Trump said he would reduce tariffs on other countries that did not retaliate against the U.S. to his baseline of 10%.

‘Look, for years we’ve been ripped off and taken advantage of by China — and others, in all fairness — but by China, there’s a big one. And it’s just one of those things,’ Trump said Wednesday.

Fallon’s bill has a counterpart in the Senate led by senators John Cornyn, R-Texas, and Gary Peters, D-Mich.

In a massive victory for President Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., the House of Representatives passed a bill Thursday that will set the stage for a massive conservative policy overhaul.

The legislation passed mostly along party lines on Thursday morning after a long night of negotiations between House GOP leaders and fiscal hawks who were critical of its spending cut levels.

Just two Republicans voted against the legislation – Reps. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., and Victoria Spartz, R-Ind. – which passed 216 to 214. No Democrats supported it, as expected. Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., held a press conference on Thursday morning in a bid to allay conservatives’ concerns.

‘I’m happy to tell you that this morning, I believe we have the votes to finally adopt the budget resolution so we can move forward on President Trump’s very important agenda for the American people,’ Johnson said. ‘Our first big, beautiful reconciliation package here, involves a number of commitments. And one of those is that we are committed to finding at least $1.5 trillion in savings for the American people, while also preserving our essential programs.’

Thune added, ‘We are aligned with the House in terms of what their budget resolution outlined in terms of savings. The speaker has talked about $1.5 trillion. We have a lot of United States senators who believe in that as a minimum.’

It comes after the House’s initial plan to vote on the legislation on Wednesday was quickly scuttled at the last minute in the face of more than a dozen Republican holdouts.

Several of those holdouts said Thune’s public commitment helped sway them in comments to reporters after the vote.

‘As a chief ally of the president and advocate for his agenda, my colleagues and I worked diligently with the Speaker and Senate Leadership to achieve a historic $1.5 trillion agreement to cut spending,’ Rep. Andy Ogles, R-Tenn., told Fox News Digital. ‘There is much work ahead, but we are committed to working together and restoring fiscal accountability to Washington DC.’

Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, told reporters, ‘We have now three strong statements from the speaker, the president and the Senate Majority Leader. We did not have those 48 hours ago. We do now.’

Congressional Republicans are working on a massive conservative policy overhaul via the budget reconciliation process. By lowering the Senate’s threshold for passage from 60 votes to 51, it allows the party in power to pass significant fiscal and budgetary policy changes.

In this case, Republicans are looking for some added funds for border security, defense, and to raise the debt ceiling – while paring back spending on the former Biden administration’s green energy policies and in other sections of the federal government, likely including entitlement programs.

GOP lawmakers are also looking to extend Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the provisions of which expire at the end of this year. They will also need new funding for Trump’s efforts to eliminate taxes on tipped and overtime wages.

The House passed its own version of the plan earlier this year, calling for at least $1.5 trillion in spending cuts to offset the new spending and attempt to bring down the national debt – which is over $36 trillion. The Senate’s plan closely aligns with the House version, but mandates a minimum of $4 billion in cuts, a significant gap to bridge.

An unrelated vote was held open for over an hour on Wednesday night, with lawmakers growing impatient on the House floor, while Johnson huddled in a back room with holdouts. 

One House Republican told Fox News Digital there was some frustration with how Johnson handled the matter.

‘He kept the entire conference out on the floor for 80 minutes while you play graba– with these people,’ the GOP lawmaker fumed. ‘And all day it was like, ‘Oh, we’re going to get this done.”

That House Republican said, ‘All the chatter we were hearing was [holdouts were] down to single digits. But 17 … 20 people were in that room. So clearly there was a much bigger problem than they were letting on all day.’

Traditionally, the House and Senate must pass identical reconciliation frameworks to begin the work of crafting policy to fit into that framework. 

Republicans are also working up against the clock – the debt ceiling is expected to be reached sometime this summer, after which the U.S. government risks a national default if it does not raise that limit to pay its debts.

Trump’s 2017 tax cuts are also projected to expire at the end of this year if they are not extended. 

Greenpeace’s United Kingdom leader and five other activists reportedly were arrested Thursday after tossing hundreds of liters of ‘blood-red dye’ into a pond at the U.S. embassy in London in a protest against the war in Gaza. 

The environmental group said the action was to ‘highlight the death and devastation caused in Gaza as a direct result of the US’ continued sale of weapons to Israel.’ 

‘Twelve activists tipped the non-toxic, biodegradable dye from containers emblazoned with the words ‘Stop Arming Israel’ into the large pond located in front of the embassy building in Nine Elms, south-west London,’ Greenpeace said in a statement. ‘The containers were delivered to the Embassy on bicycles with trailers disguised as delivery bikes.’ 

Greenpeace later said Will McCallum, the co-executive director of Greenpeace UK, was one of six people taken into custody.  

He was charged with suspicion of conspiracy to cause criminal damage, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison, according to the organization. The others reportedly received similar charges. 

‘At 07:30hrs on Thursday, 10 April, officers on duty at the US Embassy in Nine Elms became aware of a group of Greenpeace protesters putting red dye into the pond at the side of the building. The group made off, but officers responded quickly and carried out a search of the area,’ a Metropolitan Police spokesperson told Fox News Digital. ‘Six people have so far been arrested nearby on suspicion of criminal damage and conspiracy to cause criminal damage.

‘The pond is accessible via a public footpath. There was no breach or attempted breach of the secure perimeter of the site,’ the spokesperson added.

The U.S. State Department did not immediately respond Thursday to a request for comment from Fox News Digital. 

Footage released by Greenpeace UK purportedly showed the activists dumping the dye into the pond at the American embassy Thursday. 

‘We’ve turned the embassy pond blood-red because U.S. weapons continue to fuel an indiscriminate war that’s seen bombs dropped on schools and hospitals, entire neighborhoods blasted to rubble, and tens of thousands of Palestinian lives obliterated,’ Areeba Hamid, co-executive director at Greenpeace UK, said in a statement. 

‘The ceasefire Trump claimed credit for has collapsed and full-scale war is back. If Trump has any real interest in stopping the war, he should listen to the majority of Americans and stop arming Israel now,’ she added. ‘And the UK government should do the same.’ 

Big media and big finance insisted the financial sky was falling this week, but with President Donald Trump, you never know exactly where you are in any deal-making process. Weighing in too soon can make you look stupid.

On Wednesday, the deal-maker in chief announced a 90-day pause on sky-high tariffs directed at 75 nations which did not retaliate against his measures and have asked the administration for a reprieve and time to negotiate.

Democrats, and a fair number of free-marketeer conservatives to boot, celebrated Trump ‘caving’ to the pressure of the financial markets. But when the smoke settled, it was clear that, far from folding, Trump had instituted a historic tariff regime, and somehow got a stock market rally out of it.

By Thursday morning, Trump had slammed communist China with a whopping 125% tariff, maintained a 25% penalty on certain goods from Canada and Mexico, placed a blanket tariff of 10% on most of the rest of world, and had nations lined up outside the White House to negotiate like it was the Olympic opening ceremonies.

Make no mistake, as little as two months ago, those accusing Trump of folding would have called the tariffs he landed at on Wednesday unconscionable, but after the past week’s turmoil, the largest tariff increase in decades looked like a moderate, market-soothing compromise.

And the good news for working-class Americans, now the solid core of Trump’s support and that of the Republican Party, is that the effort to restore American manufacturing is only getting started.

You see, while the Ebenezer Scrooges at libertarian think tanks have long since written off small industrial towns as gone for good, Donald Trump has not. 

And it isn’t just a matter of sympathy or fairness for these far-flung factory towns, it is also a matter of national security, of being capable of making our own weapons, pharmaceuticals and computer chips.

The point of Trump’s tariff turmoil was never tariffs for their own sake; it was and is to reshape American trade and make our nation less dependent on geopolitical and ideological foes such as China.

Those who support the president’s effort to reshore manufacturing and reinvigorate forgotten America don’t care if it happens through tariffs or trade deals. They only care that the jobs come home, even if it means paying more for Chinese widgets.

Of course, this infuriates the free-marketeers for whom cheapness is next to godliness, but what did they think populism was? Mitt Romney in cowboy boots?

Of course, this infuriates the free-marketeers for whom cheapness is next to godliness, but what did they think populism was? Mitt Romney in cowboy boots?

I would say that the free traders and libertarians have no answers for small-town America, but actually they do. It appears to be flooding them with tens of thousands of Haitian migrants. Seriously.

What the free-market fanboys fail to realize is that tariffs and trade deals are not just economic issues, they are very much cultural issues as well. The question isn’t just how big a number we can ring up on the national cash register, it’s also quality of life.

Let’s take the COVID lockdowns as an example. 

Five years ago last month, the stock market crashed as the Chinese virus was unleashed. For the rest of the year, many, if not most, Americans stayed home all day and night, streamed video, and ordered from Amazon and DoorDash.

By December, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was higher than it was before COVID hit. 

Now, would any of us say that 2020 was a great time? Does anyone other than a hypochondriac New Yorker magazine essayist look back fondly on being locked in our homes and out of our houses of worship?

Of course not.

The American novelist Jack Kerouac once famously quipped, ‘I don’t want a living, I want a life.’ To be sure, those of us who are not committed to life on the road as beat poets need both, but thankfully President Trump understands that global trade is about much, much more than money.

Importantly, Trump is not doing this alone. Had his supporters panicked as so many conservative commentators did last week, he would not have achieved the tariffs we’ve arrived at or the upcoming negotiations.

The reason that Canada is buying billboards in Florida blaring the message ‘Tariffs Are Taxes’ is that they want Americans to be as freaked out over the tariffs as the Canadians I met last month in Calgary are.

But that isn’t happening. Those who believe in Trump’s vision to transform American manufacturing are heeding the president’s soothing advice to ‘be cool,’ and support his America first agenda.