Vice President JD Vance admitted that Elon Musk has made “mistakes” while carrying out his mass firings of government employees under the Department of Government Efficiency.
“Elon himself has said that sometimes you do something, you make a mistake, and then you undo the mistake,” Vance told NBC News on Friday. “I’m accepting of mistakes.”
“I also think you have to quickly correct those mistakes,” he added, acknowledging that “there are a lot of good people who work in the government—a lot of people who are doing a very good job.”
Vance did not specify what exactly those mistakes were or how they had been corrected.
Vance struck a comparatively mellow tone about the cuts in comparison to Musk, who has alleged widespread fraud and waste as a justification for DOGE’s purge of the federal workforce. In February, Musk waved a chainsaw on stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference to symbolize his efforts to scale back the federal government.
Pressed about Musk’s claims, Vance questioned the extent of the fraud that Musk has said is widespread.
“I think some people clearly are collecting a check and not doing a job,” he told NBC. “Now, how many people is that? I don’t know, in a 3 million-strong federal workforce, whether it’s a few thousand or much larger than that.”
Vance’s words also seem to undercut the scathing account President Donald Trump gave of workers last week after the Department of Education cut nearly half its staff.
“I feel very badly, but many of them don’t work at all,” Trump said, referring to the tens of thousands of workers he and Musk have laid off across the government.
”Many of them never showed up to work,” he said, without offering support for the claim.
In his interview, Vance made it clear, however, that he does agree with Trump and Musk’s push in principle.
“However big the problem is, it is a problem when people are living off the generosity of the American taxpayer in a civil service job and not doing the people’s business,” he said. ”That doesn’t distract or detract from the fact that you do have a lot of great civil servants who are doing important work.”
