Elon Musk issues chilling warning: This is 'not optional'

President Trump and Elon Musk laying out just how important Doge's cost-cutting measures are during part two of their exclusive interview with Sean Hannity. I really want to emphasize to people that this is a very important point. If we don't solve the deficit, there won't be money for medical care. There won't be money for Social Security. We either solve the deficit or all we'll be doing is paying debt. It's got to be solved or there's no medical care. There's no Social Security. There's no nothing. It's got to be solved. It's not optional. America will go bankrupt if this is not done. That's why I'm here. It's important for people to understand he's doing a big job. He's doing a very thankless job. It's really a thankless job. But he's helping us to save our country. Our country is in serious trouble. And I had to get the best guy. Teresa Payton was the White House chief information officer under President George W. Bush and is the CEO of Fortalist Solutions. And she joins me now. Teresa, good morning to you. So do you think that Elon Musk is exaggerating the situation there? Are we really in a place where if we don't start cost-cutting, people need to worry about Social Security and Medicare? He really is speaking the truth. As a country, we're broke. And so what that means is, just like we have to do in our own households every day, we have to balance the budget. We have to look at things that no longer serve us. We have to make tough decisions. Because there's real people that are impacted at the end of these decisions. But if we don't do it now, it's just going to get worse in the future. And we see it including in our technology platforms, the cyber incidents that happen against our federal departments and agencies. We need to basically bulldoze the existing bureaucracy and rebuild it for today's modern age. Well, the latest news on the Doge front revealed itself yesterday when President Trump said that he loves the idea of taking 20 percent of what Doge is saving and giving it back to the American people in the form of direct checks. And we've seen those types of checks being sent out to Americans as recently as 2021 under the American Rescue Plan that Joe Biden signed into law. So how do you feel about another round of that? Yeah, I think that could be very interesting. Obviously, we want to be careful about things that create inflation. But putting money back into the taxpayer's pocket, it's hard-earned money, is always a good thing. And then let's look at sort of a permanent way in the future for more transparency of when our dollars are collected from our businesses, from us as individuals. How are those dollars really being spent? What are they allocated for? And what investments are being made in our future? And so sometimes you have to remove the complexity, go to simplicity, and then really from a bottoms up, be able to get to that transparency. And well, speaking of transparency, Teresa, that's something that Elon Musk addressed yesterday because the big criticism of Doge and him is coming from people who say he cannot be trusted. He's got an ulterior motive, and he's going to look at people's personal information in a way that would benefit him. And he yesterday said, don't trust me. Look at doge.gov, and you can see a list of how we're cutting spending. And it's in a way that people didn't know was happening from government bureaucracies who weren't transparent to begin with. So what do you think about that? Does he have a point there? He does have a point. The one thing I will caution people is that if you think about what he's doing right now, some people call it an audit. Some people call it a sledgehammer, but really what he's doing is a data mapping, data classification transparency program. And when you do that, your early findings will change over time as your investigation continues. So it could be that garbage in, garbage out. So as they're doing their data mapping, data classification, and then releasing the results in real time, it's incredible for transparency, but it could be that there's actually bad data in these systems. And that's what's being highlighted here. Over time, as the investigations continue, as the data mapping and classifications done, we're going to have the full picture, the full story. But I, somebody who does investigations, what I would say is these are early findings. And typically over time, the news actually gets worse, but your early findings may be fine tuned. They may be tweaked. They may change a little bit. Yeah. Lots of spending bad data in the systems and also the systems themselves need to be updated, which is another thing that DOJ is trying to chat tackle. Some of them are from the 1970s, need to be brought to the 21st century. Teresa, thank you so much for joining us.