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Vice President JD Vance acknowledged "mistakes" made by Department Of Government Efficiency leader Elon Musk during his recently orchestrated mass firings of federal employees, claiming that there were "a lot of good people who work in the government" during an interview with NBC News.
“Elon himself has said that sometimes you do something, you make a mistake, and then you undo the mistake. I’m accepting of mistakes,” Vance said. “I also think you have to quickly correct those mistakes. But I’m also very aware of the fact that there are a lot of good people who work in the government — a lot of people who are doing a very good job. And we want to try to preserve as much of what works in government as possible, while eliminating what doesn’t work.”
Musk, the world's richest man, is leading President Donald Trump's initiative to slash federal spending and combat what he calls federal bureaucracy, which has included the termination of thousands of government employees since the inauguration in January. The billionaire has characterized many federal workers affected by the firings as "fraudsters" who couldn't be trusted to do their jobs.
“I think some people clearly are collecting a check and not doing a job,” Vance said when asked about Musk's comments during the NBC News interview. “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.”
“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 added. "That doesn’t distract or detract from the fact that you do have a lot of great civil servants who are doing important work. But I think most of those great civil servants would say we want to be empowered to do our job. We don’t want the person who doesn’t show up five days a week to make it harder for us to do what we need to do.”