NYT (“Inside the Explosive Meeting Where Trump Officials Clashed With Elon Musk“):
Marco Rubio was incensed. Here he was in the Cabinet Room of the White House, the secretary of state, seated beside the president and listening to a litany of attacks from the richest man in the world.
Seated diagonally opposite, across the elliptical mahogany table, Elon Musk was letting Mr. Rubio have it, accusing him of failing to slash his staff.
You have fired “nobody,” Mr. Musk told Mr. Rubio, then scornfully added that perhaps the only person he had fired was a staff member from Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
Mr. Rubio had been privately furious with Mr. Musk for weeks, ever since his team effectively shuttered an entire agency that was supposedly under Mr. Rubio’s control: the United States Agency for International Development. But, in the extraordinary cabinet meeting on Thursday in front of President Trump and around 20 others — details of which have not been reported before — Mr. Rubio got his grievances off his chest.
Mr. Musk was not being truthful, Mr. Rubio said. What about the more than 1,500 State Department officials who took early retirement in buyouts? Didn’t they count as layoffs? He asked, sarcastically, whether Mr. Musk wanted him to rehire all those people just so he could make a show of firing them again. Then he laid out his detailed plans for reorganizing the State Department.
Mr. Musk was unimpressed. He told Mr. Rubio he was “good on TV,” with the clear subtext being that he was not good for much else. Throughout all of this, the president sat back in his chair, arms folded, as if he were watching a tennis match.
After the argument dragged on for an uncomfortable time, Mr. Trump finally intervened to defend Mr. Rubio as doing a “great job.” Mr. Rubio has a lot to deal with, the president said. He is very busy, he is always traveling and on TV, and he has an agency to run. So everyone just needs to work together.
The meeting was a potential turning point after the frenetic first weeks of Mr. Trump’s second term. It yielded the first significant indication that Mr. Trump was willing to put some limits on Mr. Musk, whose efforts have become the subject of several lawsuits and prompted concerns from Republican lawmakers, some of whom have complained directly to the president.
Cabinet officials almost uniformly like the concept of what Mr. Musk set out to do — reducing waste, fraud and abuse in government — but have been frustrated by the chain saw approach to upending the government and the lack of consistent coordination.
Thursday’s meeting, which was abruptly scheduled on Wednesday evening, was a sign that Mr. Trump was mindful of the growing complaints. He tried to offer each side something by praising both Mr. Musk and his cabinet secretaries. (At least one, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who has had tense encounters related to Mr. Musk’s team, was not present.) The president made clear he still supported the mission of the Musk initiative. But now was the time, he said, to be a bit more refined in its approach.
From now on, he said, the secretaries would be in charge; the Musk team would only advise.
But if nothing else, the session laid bare the tensions within Mr. Trump’s team, and news of the sharp clashes spread quickly through senior ranks of cabinet agencies after it was over. This account is based on interviews with five people with knowledge of the events.
In a post on social media after the meeting, Mr. Trump said the next phase of his plan to cut the federal work force would be conducted with a “scalpel” rather than a “hatchet” — a clear reference to Mr. Musk’s scorched-earth approach.
Mr. Musk, who wore a suit and tie to Thursday’s meeting instead of his usual T-shirt after Mr. Trump publicly ribbed him about his sloppy appearance, defended himself by saying that he had three companies with a market cap of tens of billions of dollars, and that his results spoke for themselves.
But he was soon clashing with members of the cabinet.
Just moments before the blowup with Mr. Rubio, Mr. Musk and the transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, went back and forth about the state of the Federal Aviation Administration’s equipment for tracking airplanes and what kind of fix was needed. Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, jumped in to support Mr. Musk.
Mr. Duffy said the young staff of Mr. Musk’s team was trying to lay off air traffic controllers. What am I supposed to do? Mr. Duffy said. I have multiple plane crashes to deal with now, and your people want me to fire air traffic controllers?
[…]
The secretary of veterans affairs, Doug Collins, has been dealing with one of the most politically sensitive challenges of all the cabinet secretaries. Mr. Musk’s cuts will affect thousands of veterans — a powerful constituency and a core part of the Trump base. Mr. Collins made the point that they should not wield a blunt instrument and cleave off everyone from the V.A. They needed to be strategic about it. Mr. Trump agreed with Mr. Collins, saying they ought to retain the smart ones and get rid of the bad ones.
While I have never attended a cabinet meeting under any administration, it’s hard to imagine cabinet secretaries being berated by anyone other than the President, much less a random civilian with no apparent government role. Even the White House Chief of Staff, often considered the second most powerful person in government, would feel constrained in a cabinet meeting.
One can’t imagine people took posts as cabinet secretaries only to be stooges for Musk. And, seemingly, the President is at least listening to their frustrations and seeing that the chainsaw approach is not working. And Musk is wearing a suit now!
Folks are more than a wee bit skeptical, though, that any real change is coming.
POLITICO (“‘I don’t trust a word of it’: Federal workers deeply skeptical that Trump will rein in Musk“):
Federal workers, Democrats and even some Republican lawmakers want to believe that President Donald Trump clipped billionaire adviser Elon Musk’s wings Thursday.
But many of them aren’t counting on it.
After Trump privately told his Cabinet that they are in charge of their departments and Musk does not have the authority to fire government workers — a stunning shift in their alliance should it pan out — rank-and-file federal employees said they were skeptical in light of weeks of confusing and contradictory guidance. None of the more than a dozen federal workers POLITICO spoke to reported being told by their supervisors or labor unions that anything had changed directly due to Trump’s Cabinet meeting and subsequent comments.
[…]
The news of Thursday’s Cabinet meeting set off rampant speculation within the federal workforce about the true intent of Trump’s comments, which come amid growing legal and political scrutiny. A pair of lawsuits argue that the empowerment of Musk within the Trump administration is so far-reaching that, barring confirmation from the Senate, it exceeds constitutional limits.
[…]
While DOGE has excited the GOP base that is eager to chop down government waste, the Trump administration has been dogged by headlines about essential employees, like nuclear safety workers and bird flu response aides, being fired and then hastily re-hired. Republicans have also faced blowback over veterans being laid off and questions over reported plans to cut tens of thousands of staffers at the Department of Veterans Affairs.
In a post on the social media platform Truth Social Thursday, Trump broke rhetorically with Musk’s aggressive approach to cutting the government. “We say the ‘scalpel’ rather than the ‘hatchet,’” he said. “It’s very important that we cut levels down to where they should be, but it’s also important to keep the best and most productive people.”
But in classic fashion, Trump seemed to contradict himself afterward, telling reporters that Musk would step in if departments didn’t adequately trim the government themselves. “Elon and the group are going to be watching them, and if they can cut, it’s better. And if they don’t cut, then Elon will do the cutting,” he said.
[…]
On Capitol Hill, Democratic lawmakers were similarly skeptical, though they hope Trump carries through with demoting Musk and pulling back dramatic cuts to the federal workforce.
“If that’s true, that’s good news for the country and the separation of powers,” said Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii). “But I think it’s reasonable to give it a few business days to see whether any actual change has happened. Because right now there’s lots of evidence of, sort of, mayhem. And if the president wants to get that under control, he can. And if he doesn’t, he won’t.”
In a Friday interview on Fox News, Speaker Mike Johnson suggested that Trump’s remarks at the Cabinet meeting presaged a real shift in governance. But he provided few details and downplayed any tension between the billionaire tech mogul and Trump’s hand-picked officials.
“I think the president kind of did a recalibration yesterday,” he said. “He brought in Elon and he brought in the Cabinet secretaries, and they had a dialogue about the process to formalize more of this.”
Johnson also said some government workers would get their jobs back and that Veterans Affairs “needs employees who are doing this noble work” of taking care of veterans.
“Stay tuned because it’s gonna be corrected,” he said. “And I’ve talked to Elon about this personally, and many of us have. He has completely pure motives. He’s trying to make the government work better for the people, all the people. And the essential employees and the people doing great work will come back.”
That Members of Congress are relying on hope as their strategy is not reassuring. There is reason to hope that the backlash against some of the more obviously stupid firings will rein in the excesses but, thus far, there seems to be relatively little concern about the lives being upended and the permanent damage being done to the ability of agencies to do the jobs their charged with under the law.
An additional source of hope: Fox News is starting to notice the negative effects.
Jonathan Lemire, The Atlantic (“Is DOGE Losing Steam?“):
President Donald Trump’s shift on the Department of Government Efficiency began with a warning from an unlikely source.
Jesse Watters, a co-host of the Fox News hit show The Five, is usually a slick deliverer of MAGA talking points. But on February 19, Watters told a surprisingly emotional story about a friend working at the Pentagon who was poised to lose his job as part of the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts to the federal workforce. “I finally found one person I knew who got DOGE’d, and it hit me in the heart,” said Watters, who urged his Fox colleagues to “be a little bit less callous.”
Although Watters soon resumed championing DOGE, the moment went viral. Trump watched the clip and asked advisers if it was resonating with his base of supporters, according to one of three White House officials I spoke with for this story (they requested anonymity so they could discuss private conversations).
Over the ensuing weeks, the president grew unhappy with the television coverage of cuts affecting his voters, according to two of those officials, while the White House fielded calls from Cabinet members and Republican lawmakers frustrated by Elon Musk, the billionaire tech mogul empowered to slash the federal government. Some of Trump’s top advisers became worried about the political fallout from DOGE’s sweeping cuts, especially after seeing scenes of angry constituents yelling at GOP members of Congress in town halls.
[…]
Trump’s first public effort to put a leash on Musk appears to mark the end of DOGE’s opening chapter, and a potential early turning point in Trump’s new administration.
Many in the GOP have reveled in the brash way that Musk and his young team of engineers have strode into government agencies, seized the computers, and slashed jobs and budgets. And few Republicans have been willing to publicly challenge Musk, who has taken on hero status with many on the right and wields an unfathomable fortune with which he can punish his political foes. But important figures within the president’s orbit—including some senior staffers and outside advisers—now quietly hope that the cuts, as Trump himself posted on social media yesterday, will be done with a “‘scalpel’ rather than the ‘hatchet.’”
“I don’t want to see a big cut where a lot of good people are cut,” Trump said to reporters in the Oval Office after yesterday’s meeting. But, he added, “Elon and the group are going to be watching them, and if they can cut, it’s better. And if they don’t cut, then Elon will do the cutting.”
[…]
Six weeks into Trump’s term, the White House has declined to say how many people have left the federal government so far, or how many more it wants to see fired as it looks to reshape the government’s civil service of 2.3 million workers. Democrats, shaking off their despondency after November’s elections, have rallied against Musk, trying to save agencies such as USAID and warning that all Americans, no matter their political party, would feel the impact of DOGE cuts to agencies such as the Federal Aviation Administration, the IRS, and the Department of Agriculture. Musk paid them no heed, trashing Democrats’ objections to his more than 219 million followers on X and wielding an actual chain saw onstage at a conservative conference last month. Days later, he directed that an email be sent to the entire federal workforce asking workers to justify their employment by listing their accomplishments of the past week.
That was the breaking point for several Cabinet members. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and FBI Director Kash Patel were among the officials who voiced complaints to their staff and to the White House that Musk was usurping their authority, one of the White House officials told me. Their agencies, along with many others, instructed employees not to reply to Musk’s email, and the government’s main personnel agency later said that responding was voluntary, neutering DOGE’s threats. Trump’s Cabinet officials broadly agree with DOGE’s mission—to reduce waste, fraud, and abuse in government—but object to the seemingly haphazard way it is being executed.
Relatively few people support fraud, waste, and abuse. But sending people who don’t know what they’re doing in to look for programs that sound funny isn’t the way to unearth it. Nor is the mass firing of probationary employees, Presidential Management Fellows, and the like aim plausibly aimed at fraud, waste, and abuse.
