DOGE and the Mystery of the State Department Teslas

25:28Well, all of our actions are fully public. So if you see anything, you say like, wait a second, hey, that seems like maybe that's, you know, there's a conflict there. It's not like people are going to be shy about saying that. They'll say it immediately. Including you yourself. Yes. But transparency is what builds trust. Not simply somebody asserting trust. So not somebody saying they're trustworthy, but transparency so you can see everything that's going on. And you can see, am I doing something that benefits one of my companies or not? It's totally obvious. As evidence of his commitment to transparency, Elon says he's even created a website you can visit, doge.gov slash savings.

26:08A long, frequently updated list of everything he says he's cut to save taxpayer money. I looked at it with Bobby. Can you describe what it looks like? Sure. So we have a gold money sign. It says Department of Government Efficiency. see. If this were a real government department, I'm not sure that we'd have this like crypto looking money sign as the icon, but there it is. Right next to that, it has a little American flag and it says an official website of the United States government. Okay. So it sounds official. It says estimated savings,$105 billion. Amount saved per taxpayer, it says$652.17.

26:49So there you OPJ. According to Elon, Doge has already saved both of us$652. All right. So, okay. So then you scroll down and there's like a long list. It looks like a credit card statement in reverse because it's like places where money's being spent, literally the location, and then the amount. And can you like, just talk to me about one of these line items. Okay. So one savings that Musk has boasted about is canceling a$9 million payment to Reuters, so the news agency, for large-scale social deception, right? And Musk has presented this as some sort of smoking gun that the government was paying Reuters to deceive people, right?

27:31But when reporters actually looked into this, first of all, it wasn't Reuters the news agency, but was Thomas Reuters Special Service, which is like a data and research arm of Reuters, totally separate company. And the Defense Department had a contract with them to fight against social deception. And the kicker is the contract was actually signed in Trump's first term. Oh, wow. Okay. Okay. But so if you're like someone who is predisposed to Musk's worldview and you're somebody who feels like the media is liberal, which I don't disagree with, but you feel like the media is literally working with Democrats to lie to people, which is something I do disagree with.

28:14Like, this looks like at some point Joe Biden was like, we need to pay Reuters, the news agency, money to deceive people. Give them the money and we'll write them in the budget. And Musk went through and was like, this is wrong. And like, if you take him at his word, this is what you think happened. Exactly right. And look, by the time the fact checkers come out and say, hey, guys, this actually is a terrible example of wasteful spending for all of these reasons. The news cycle has already moved on and Musk is already promoting some other savings. There's so many just absurdities when you really look at it carefully.

28:47But again, I think to Elon, what really matters is just, you know, just having sort of daily headlines being generated about doing something. Because to most Trump fans and people who love Elon, no matter how the media covers it, the media isn't to be trusted. So if the media is out here truth squatting all these contracts, no, we're going to scold you. No, it is not a$5 billion contract. It is a$5 million contract. I don't know. Some fans of Elon Musk might be like, well, at least we're saving$5 million. You know, like, sometimes there's like a journalistic win, but it's like, to their supporters, I don't know that that's changing any minds.

29:31Honestly, all these fact checks, they probably weren't. Polling published just this week shows that a majority of Americans support Doge. 54 % say it should influence government spending. 51 % approve of Trump's cuts to federal agencies. And more people say Musk is cutting waste than disagree. Which means if you're a Doge skeptic, you're actually in the minority. But that's also why the story about the State Department Teslas seems to Bobby like such an obviously big deal. If Trump's State Department was planning to send$400 million to Tesla, that sure looks like, at best, waste. At worst, corruption.

30:10the problems Elon's Doge Commission had promised to eradicate. That's how it looked. But there wasn't yet any proof. After a short break, an anonymous source reaches out to Bobby Allen.

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32:38Welcome back to the show. So that press conference with Musk in the Oval Office explaining that the glare of public attention would keep him honest, that happened in early February, the day before Ryan Grimm's story about the mysterious$400 million Tesla line item was published. Once that story's out, we know what happens. Elon says it's a lie. The word Tesla magically disappears from a government website. And then Bobby's NPR story comes out. And Trump's State Department finally issues a public response. They issue this bullet point statement that's basically like, oh, yeah, this is something that started in the Biden administration.

33:17So they're pointing a finger at the Biden White House, the Biden State Department. and they basically suggest, oh, well, this was a Biden thing. We're getting rid of it. We're not going to move forward. I think the language they used was it's indefinitely on hold, whatever that means, but they have no plans to pursue it. So the subtext is both, this wasn't our call. You guys leapt to the conclusion that this looks like perhaps a kind of self-dealing. This is something the Biden administration did and we're not even fulfilling it. This was like, you guys are mad at Trump. You should be mad at Biden.

33:47Like the eggs on your face, journalists. That's right. Yeah. At this point, it felt a lot like the story was done. If the State Department's telling the truth, and it was Joe Biden's people who initiated this Tesla deal, then no one thinks there's a conflict of interest here. At this point, Bobby's curiosity was still alive, but it wasn't clear what he could do with it. In my position, I don't have access to these confidential State Department records. So when the State Department issues a statement saying, here is our explanation, I, correspondent for NPR, have to update my story saying, here's the State Department's explanation.

34:23And that's what I did. I was like, they're pointing at Biden and they're saying it's over with. We are expunging this from the spreadsheet. Nothing to see here, folks. And so as like a rule following journalists for NPR, it's like the government has made a statement. We know that when the government makes a statement, you put in the story. As like a human being, student of the internet and follower of Elon Musk making statements, what were you thinking as a person? then? It didn't exactly pass the sniff test for so many different reasons. But again, I don't have the access they have. And so, you know, an investigative reporter might say, OK, we'll just file a FOIA.

35:00But in this Trump era, most reporters are assuming FOIAs are just going to be dead in the water. So I was like, OK, cool. Yeah, I'll file this FOIA. Maybe I'll get a response like three years from now that it's been delayed. But I'm a breaking news reporter. I'm interested in Elon. I'm interested in tech. I'm interested in what Musk is doing in the White House. I want an answer now. So I'm just making as many calls as I can. I'm trying to dig around. And then finally, something lands in my inbox, and it came in the form of an anonymous reader complaining about my story. And let me just say, when you work at a national news organization and you do stories about divisive figures like Trump and Musk.

35:39These kinds of complaints are legion. I mean, all the time. I'm sure you get them too, PJ. It's just, they're constant. So I just took a deep breath. I go, okay, another one of these. Can you read the email? Sure. Let me pull it up. And again, this came in from a person who was not willing to identify themselves. Okay. This person says, You mentioned that the White House says the contract had been started under the Biden administration. This is not true. The State Department was a laggard in federal fleet electrification and reluctant to acquire any, never mind the necessary charging infrastructure.

36:27They had no money for this. Bobby only read a part of this email to protect the identity of a source. But essentially, the source was saying they'd had real knowledge of the actual plans for how Biden's State Department planned to spend money in 2025. And those plans did not involve sending$400 million to Tesla. And so after reading this, I thought, this is not just somebody carping to me. It's someone who seems to be suggesting they were in the Biden White House and they, better than anyone I could imagine, would be in a position to know that this is BS. And that when Trump suggests that this whole thing started in the Biden administration, this person might be able to definitively prove that is not the case.

37:12And I was super excited to get this person on the phone, but they weren't so excited to talk to me. Right. What ensues is days of the wheedling, behind-the-scenes conversations that are the most boring but consequential parts of being a reporter. And in the end, the source agrees to send the document to Bobby. Actually, it gets picked up by an intermediary. But Bobby finally gets the document, this shred of proof he was looking for. How do you feel? Oh, it was amazing. I just like, you know, poured a hot cup of coffee, sat down, pushed this thing on my two monitors, my work at home station. And I was like, oh, wait, it's only seven pages.

37:52Oh, well, it's not going to take very long to read this. I can do it pretty quickly. But the important big revelation, if that's what you want to call it, in this document is that the Biden administration had set aside$483 ,000 for buying EVs this year, which obviously is very different than$400 million. And this document, just like, is it something you can read from? Is it just like a spreadsheet? Totally. Yeah. It's a government document. And this felt like I like, you know, Christmas came earlier or something. It says for Bobby Allen dot PDF. How exciting. OK, click. And I scroll down and it's a government document that the State Department sent to the White House being like, hey, we know you officials working under Biden have all of these electric vehicle requirements and standards and goals.

38:48We know that you want us to put some money aside to fulfill some of these goals. Here is our plan. Here are our concerns. Here's the amount of money we want to throw at it. And yeah, it was like$400 and some thousand dollars to buy some EVs for the State Department. And then there was this other little box. I mean, the first thing I did, actually, PJ, when I got this document was Control-F Tesla. Like, that was number one. Oh, interesting. And so when I did that, it brought me to this box. And when I click Tesla, there is so much lingo, right? But it basically says, there's been a request to collect information about capabilities from industry.

39:26It's received one response, Tesla in parentheses, which the AV program is reviewing. That's armored vehicle. So here, Bobby could actually see what Biden's State Department's intentions had been to set aside a relatively small amount of money to explore the possibility of making electric some of the armored cars that diplomats and other employees used to get around in places that could be dangerous. So right now, if you're a foreign service worker or like an ambassador in like Mogadishu and you're going from a meeting site, you know, back to the embassy, you'll have a car that's paid for by taxpayers.

40:05Typically, it's a car that was built to be armored. It's a super, super secure car. And it'll drive you from point A to point B. And what everything we're talking about here is about is there was a push in the Biden administration to just like start thinking about the United States global footprint when it comes to our use of combustion engines and, you know, how can we maybe replace some of them with EVs? And so this is where this initiative is coming from. Like, oh, maybe one day down the road, like really far down the road when the technology really advances and everyone has charging stations.

40:33Yeah, because you'd assume that a lot of places where diplomats are driving around in armored cars are not going to have Tesla superchargers every X amount of miles. Totally, totally, totally. Yeah, especially in remote, conflict-torn parts of the world. I mean, you're not going to find a Tesla charging station. But it was this idea of just like, let's start looking into it. And because Tesla's the biggest electric vehicle company, they're like, let's start engaging Tesla about that. To be honest with you, I genuinely don't know whether our federal fleet of armored diplomatic vehicles should be electric or gas.

41:07I don't know if it's a good idea to spend$400 ,000-ish looking into it. If you were the head of Doge, looking for cuts, you could convince me that this was a decent one to make. $400 ,000, back to the taxpayer. But instead what happened is that$400 ,000-ish was turned into$400 million, and earmarked for Tesla specifically. Tesla, a company which does not make armored vehicles, and whose car windows did break that time Franz threw a big ball at them. I digress. Bobby had the document proving that the$400 million line item had not originated under Joe Biden. It had originated under Trump. Bobby verified the document by finding other people who worked on that forecast.

41:52And now he had a new story. So he writes it up. He asked the State Department to provide a response and gets one. But their response was super underwhelming. So the State Department writes me and it says the numbers provided in the document were an estimate. As mentioned, this was a request for information, not a solicitation for a contract. The RFI, request for information, was strictly to gather information. And the Department of State has no intentions to move forward with the solicitation, which is a mouthful. Right? But in plain English, as someone who has been obsessed with this story for a little bit, what the State Department is saying here is they're canceling this effort.

42:37They're not planning to go forward with it. And in terms of how do they come up with the$400 million, they're conceding here it was an estimate. They're not saying by whom or what exactly it was going to purchase or where these Teslas would be sent, but that's what they gave me. And I obviously replied to them with a long list of follow-up questions for a little bit more clarity and got nothing, but that's what they said. Bobby published a story, and unlike a lot of the fact checks that I've seen come and go in the past couple months, this one actually got a fair amount of traction. For whatever reason, the idea of focusing on this one obscure, mysterious line item in a procurement forecast?

43:18That week anyway, people seemed able to pay attention. Bobby had a theory as to why that might have been. Every time you put on CNN or MSNBC, you see talking heads fighting about conflicts of interest and potential abuses of power. But here we have a very specific example of that maybe happening. and something about$400 million of taxpayer money paying for Cybertrucks just set people off. I mean, still, my inbox is full of responses. My signal chats are full of random people reaching out. It's just I'm getting a flood of people offering their opinion, expressing outrage, or Elon fans attacking me for pointing this out.

43:58Yeah, it just it really did kind of kind of strike a nerve. here's what I know is going to be one of the hardest things about the next four years holding on to uncertainty reminding ourselves of everything that we actually don't know this story I don't think inspires a lot of trust in Elon Musk in a fair-minded listener but we actually don't know if he told somebody to give Tesla 400 million dollars or if some sycophant just made a move that Musk was legitimately unaware of or what other possibility could have transpired. But what we can know, even with the information we have, is how this administration, how Doge, how Elon Musk handles mistakes.

44:41The most good faith reading of what happened you could draw is that a mistake was made. And when the mistake was made, Elon Musk made accusations. He said there was nothing to see here. He did not say this shouldn't have happened or explain how it had. And while many reasonable people on the left and right think that the government is bloated and dysfunctional, who could get on board with a scalpel, maybe even a chainsaw being taken to some of our regulations and bureaucracy, you'd really want to believe that the person doing it was transparent and not sloppy. At a minimum, you'd want to think they're capable of admitting when they're wrong.

45:16Even for those of us who are trying to be painfully, annoyingly open-minded, stories like this offer an uncomfortable amount of certainty about the present realities. you're a journalist you're a citizen you're a person who lives on the internet like everybody else you're trying to figure out and for the next four years like how to be sane how much attention to pay where to put your attention do you feel like you learned anything from this reporting experience about that yeah i think i learned you know there's a certain amount of cynicism a lot of reporters have sometimes covering trump and covering musk which is like every day is, someone put it recently, every day is a white Bronco day, right?

45:59Every day feels like it's OJ speeding on the freeway in his white Bronco. It's like that level of an insane breaking news day. And no matter what you do or say or can expose, it's going to wash over by the morning. To be optimistic, I kind of learned that, you know, if you push hard enough, maybe there can be some change. Maybe there can be pressure. Maybe the audience will care. It's a very noisy, chaotic world right now, and it's only going to become more so. But look, I never thought that millions of people would care about this tiny little line item in a State Department spreadsheet. It sounds pretty boring to me, but it's consequential.

46:40It's consequential. So yeah, I think it gives me hope that at least the audience cares about this kind of stuff. What still is the part of this mystery that we don't know the answer to? What we don't know is who put the$400 million into that document. Was it a Doge worker? Was it a State Department worker? Was it Elon himself? No idea. Big question mark there. So who did this? And equally as puzzling, was this a mistake? Were there zeros added? Or was this really their intention for this to be quietly done? $400 million of taxpayer money for Teslas to be quietly just pushed through, no one would notice.

47:23And that would be it. And I'd love a follow up to be, hey, we found the man or woman who put this in there. And they said it was a mistake. And here's their story. If you're listening, and you're that person, let's talk. Because I would love to close that chapter out. But as of now, we just don't know. That's the mystery.

47:51Bobby Allen, he's a tech correspondent for NPR. If you want to listen to his reporting, you can find him on NPR. If you want to help him with his reporting, you can find him on Signal at B-A-L-L-Y-N.77.

48:13We're going to take a short break. And when we come back, I'm going to say the word potato.

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51:55Potato.

52:03Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Shruti Penimaneni. And it was roost by Garrett Graham and Noah John. Fact-checking by Holly Patton. Theme, original composition and mixing by Armin Bazarian. Additional production support by Sean Merchant and Kim Kupal. If you'd like to support our show, keep it alive, and get ad-free episodes, zero reruns, and the occasional bonus audio, please consider signing up for Incognito Mode. You can learn more at searchengine.show. We are also going to have early access to our merch, which is coming out soon, for Incognito Mode members.

52:38Our executive producer is Leah Reese Dennis. Thank you to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Pro, and John Schmidt. And to the team at Odyssey, J.D. Crowley, Robin Randi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Matt Casey, Nora Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Schaaf. Our agent is Oren Rosenbaum at UTA. Follow and listen to Search Engine for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.

53:21Thank you.