Elon Musk announces DOGE will investigate lawmakers who are 'strangely wealthy'

Elon Musk on Sunday shared that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has selected its new target: Lawmakers who are worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars despite a modest, by comparison, public salary.

Regular senators and House lawmakers currently earn $174,000 annually, while Senate leaders earn $193,400 per year, according to the upper chamber's website. That salary would not explain how some lawmakers are now worth tens of millions, even after decades in the chamber. People like former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are worth hundreds of millions.

Musk told a Wisconsin audience that he would look into the flood of wealth, after an attendee asked him if DOGE had uncovered evidence of money sent from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) to Democrats in Congress.

“They’ll [the government] send the money overseas to one NGO [non-governmental organization], then they’ll go through a bunch of them, and then I’m highly confident that a bunch of that money then comes back to the United States and lands in the pockets of [lawmakers]” Musk said. “But it is a circuitous route. It doesn’t go directly, but let’s just say that there’s a lot of strangely wealthy members of Congress where I’m trying to connect the dots of, ‘How do they become rich?'

“How do they get $20 million if they’re earning $200,000 a year?” Musk continued. “No one can explain that. We’re going to try to figure it out and certainly stop it from happening.”

Two of the wealthiest members of Congress are Pelosi and Florida Republican Sen. Rick Scott. Pelosi is worth an estimated $250 million, according to the New York Post, and Scott is worth about $550 million. 

Scott's wealth stems largely from co-founding healthcare companies HCA Healthcare and Solantic, which operate hospitals and urgent care clinics around the state. His work with the companies occurred before he joined the Senate.

Pelosi's fortune can primarily be attributed to stocks that her husband, a venture capitalist, invested in major corporations, including Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft and Netflix. 

In July of last year, bipartisan legislation passed out of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee to ban stock ownership and trading for sitting members of Congress, but it didn't go any further, according to Newsweek. 

Misty Severi is a news reporter for Just The News. You can follow her on X for more coverage.