Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia, who has taken a role in the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), is aiming to digitize the government’s retirement process, calling the current system an “injustice to civil servants.”
“This will be an online digital process that will take just a few days at most… it’s an injustice to civil servants who are subjected to these processes,” Gebbia said during an exclusive sit-down interview with “Special Report” on Thursday. Gebbia joined Musk and six other members of the DOGE team to shed light on the department’s cost-cutting mission with executive editor Bret Baier.
For his part, Gebbia said he is aiming to turn the paper-based retirement process for federal employees into a system that only takes a few days. He said the antiquated system in its current state takes months.
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“There is a mine in Pennsylvania that houses every paper document for the retirement process in the government,” Gebbia said.
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“This giant cave has 22,000 filing cabinets stacked 10 high to house 400 million pieces of paper,” he said, adding that the process started in the 1950s and largely has not changed in the last 70 years.
“We really believe that the government can have an Apple-like store experience. Beautifully designed, great user experience, modern systems,” Gebbia continued.
His efforts are among DOGE’s broader goal to eliminate the “waste and fraud” in the federal government. On Thursday, Musk said DOGE is looking to reduce government spending by at least 15%, which he believes is “quite achievable.”
Musk has previously said that the nation’s debt is so high that the interest payments exceed the entire military budget and that DOGE is necessary to prevent the country from sinking into bankruptcy.
Shortly after President Donald Trump was sworn into office, he gave Musk’s organization 18 months to streamline government operations and slash spending.
Since then, the department has canceled numerous diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives at federal agencies, consulting contracts, leases for underused federal buildings and duplicate agencies and programs.
As of March 28, DOGE claims on its website that it has saved Americans $130 billion, or $807.45 per taxpayer, from a combination of asset sales, contract/lease cancellations and renegotiations, fraud and improper payment deletion, grant cancellations, interest savings, programmatic changes, regulatory savings and workforce reductions.
However, with those cuts come challenges. Some judges have already called for the reinstatement of probationary employees across dozens of agencies who were fired. Last week, two judges issued back-to-back rulings that would effectively reinstate workers from 24 agencies.
Musk’s work with DOGE has also spurred protests from opponents who have in some cases targeted Tesla, the automaker for which he serves as CEO. Those incidents have featured cases of vandalism targeting individual Tesla owners, as well as the EV-maker’s dealerships and charging stations.
Lawmakers have also raised some concerns. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, also posted on X earlier this month that Alaskan U.S. Agency for International Development employees informed her about the “confusing and callous handling of personnel matters by OPM and DOGE” and “painted an incredibly troubling picture of what the world looks like without humanitarian assistance from the United States.”
FOX Business’ Eric Revell contributed to this report.
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