Podcaster and now-Deputy Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Dan Bongino, commenting on the success of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in rooting out fraud inside the government back in early March, exposed how the Elon Musk-led department had discovered the “mother lode of fraud inside our government.”

In the podcast episode in which he commented on the matter, Bongino used an announcement from White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt to make his point, noting that “trillions of dollars” in potential fraud had been discovered in America’s expensive entitlement programs.

Beginning, he said, “Here’s Karoline Levitt in the White House press, who has done an amazing job in just a month there, talking about massive fraud, potentially in the trillions, in our entitlement programs, between Social Security people getting it who aren’t entitled to it. Pun intended, Medicaid, Medicare, trillions of dollars in potential fraud there. The Democrats don’t want you to see any of this, because every dollar of government spending is good spending to them. Check this out.”

In the clip Bongino then rolled, a journalist noted to Leavitt that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and her staff claimed to have discovered a whopping “$2.7 trillion in improper payments” made by entitlement programs like Medicaid and Medicare, with much of that waste and fraud going overseas, and asked how President Trump is thinking about the matter.

Leavitt noted, “There’s a very long list of the fraud, waste and abuse that Doge is identifying on a daily basis. Elon Musk also talked about yesterday about Social Security payments that are going out the door for people who are no longer with us. Unfortunately, I would say that is certainly fraud.”

Ending the clip, Bongino noted that there are massive amounts of fraud that have been discovered, saying, “Folks, there are massive amounts of fraud. I’m playing the Bongino rule to a lot of this, because there’s going to be some things that look like fraud that aren’t, because government databases are so poorly kept. But there’s going to be other massive instances of fraud in these programs.”

Continuing, Bongino argued that the government, before DOGE, both had no reason to clean up its spending and didn’t do so, as the bureaucrats being the spending are spending taxpayer dollars rather than their own money. He said, “Ladies and gentlemen, the government doesn’t have any real incentive to clean up its payment system. It’s Milton Friedman’s fourth way to spend money. The worst way to spend money is the fourth way. You have tons of it. You can spend your own money on yourself. You can spend your own money on other people. Other people can spend other people’s money on themselves. And the worst way, number four, other people can spend other people’s money on other people. If it’s other people’s money, you don’t care about the cost.”

Continuing, he built upon his description of the bad incentives at play, saying, “If you’re spending it on other people, you don’t care about the quality, because you’re not even buying anything for yourself. In any program that runs by those by that particular logic skeleton, there’s no way you’re not going to get massive amounts of fraud.”

Then, demanding the GOP legislators take action now, while they have the chance, Bongino said, “Now, I’m begging the Republican senators and congressmen who know this, if you do not shrink government now, while we have the political momentum in capital and the snapshots and the soundbites and this bull in a china shop in the White House, if you don’t do it now, we are never going to do it, and you are going to have walked us into it from a de facto to a de jure bankruptcy, and I’m not having it.”

Posting about the matter on Facebook when sharing the clip, Bongino noted that the fraud he and Leavitt mentioned was the “mother lode,” saying, “Folks, Elon Musk and DOGE may have just hit the mother lode of the fraud inside our government. Keep your eye on this…” Watch him here: