Vice President Vance said during an interview that senior President Trump adviser Elon Musk has made some “mistakes” with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) firings of federal government workers, adding that he thinks there are “a lot of good people” who work in government.
“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 in an interview with NBC News published on Friday.
“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,” the vice president added. “And we want to try to preserve as much of what works in government as possible, while eliminating what doesn’t work.”
Since assuming office on Jan. 20, the Trump administration has put a heavy focus on overhauling the federal government, utilizing DOGE, an advisory board, to probe federal agencies to cut down on government spending and reduce the size of the federal workforce, which has resulted in the firing of thousands of employees.
DOGE’s work has been met with pushback from lawmakers on Capitol Hill, activists on the ground and various groups filing lawsuits, some of which have resulted in federal orders pausing mass terminations.
Recent polling also suggests that Americans are relatively unhappy with DOGE’s efforts. A Quinnipiac University poll, released this week, found that 60 percent of U.S. adults are not supportive of the advisory board’s handling of workers employed with the federal government. Some 36 percent said they are supportive of the effort.
Vance claimed on Friday, similarly to Musk, that “some people clearly are collecting a check and not doing a job.”
“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,” he told NBC.
The vice president stressed that while it is a “problem” when employees enjoy the taxpayer-funded role and do not do the work, there are still those who are valuable contributors to the federal workforce.
“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,” Vance said. “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.”
In recent weeks, Vance has faced pushback from pro-Ukraine protestors near his home and was even met with boos during an appearance at the newly-reformed Kennedy Center in Washington.
“The thing at the Kennedy Center I thought was funny,” Vance said. “The thing by my house I thought was kind of annoying. I think you just kind of take the good with the bad. … I kind of just see it as, depending on your perspective, a feature or a bug of this new life.”
