Bulwark Takes - Elon Demoted! Musk’s Government Takeover Finally Imploding?

Episode Date: March 6, 2025

Sam Stein and Andrew Egger talk Donald Trump's cabinet meeting telling top officials that they have control, NOT Musk, cutting back his overall power.

Hey guys, it's me, Sam Stein, Managing Editor at The Bulwark, and I'm joined by Andrew Egger, the author of Morning Shots. It's Thursday, midday, March 6th. Subscribe to the feed. We're about to talk about Elon. An L for Elon, who this afternoon it was reported that during a Trump cabinet meeting, which Musk attended, the president told cabinet secretaries that they actually have the authority, mostly the final say, to make staffing decisions around their own agencies. Now, in normal times, this would be treated as an of course, because of course. Why did we need to clarify this? We need to clarify this because Elon's been going completely batshit crazy on these agencies, taking an absolute ax to them, cutting staffers,

cutting functions that then he has to go back and add because he fucked it up so badly. And people are getting pissed off about this. So before I get to Andrew, the smartest guy that we have on staff, let me just read what Donald Trump put out in a – what do they call these things again? A bleat. We're calling them a bleat. Okay, here's the bleat. Donald Trump, the golden age of America has just begun, exclamation point. Over the past six weeks, our administration has delivered on promises like no administration before it, always putting America first. DOGE has been an incredible success.

And now that we have my cabinet in place, I've instructed the secretaries and leadership to work with DOGE on cost-cutting measures and staffing. As the secretaries learn about and understand the people working for the various departments, they can be very precise as to who will remain and who will go. We say the scalpel rather than the hatchet. A combination of them, Elon Doge, and other great people will be able to do things at a historic level. We just had a meeting with most of the secretaries, Elon and others, and it was a very positive one. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We're going to have these meetings every two weeks. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, so on and so forth. Politico is reporting this a little bit more directly saying,

you know, I got rebuked. But Andrew, what do you make of it? Yeah, all this stuff is really funny because the line from the White House is always like, we don't know what anybody's talking about. Everybody's rowing in the same direction here. We're all on the same page under the August leadership of Donald J. Trump. But this is a huge shift, right? I mean, this is extremely striking on a few different levels. One is that there have been these kind of head-butting clashes between Elon Musk and the actual cabinet secretaries who, in theory, constitutionally have the authority over these agencies for a couple of weeks now, right? I mean, we saw this bubbling up in a bunch of different ways. I mean, Marco Rubio at the State Department would say that certain programs would be protected. And then Elon Musk's doge bros

actually down there with their hands on the levers would cut these programs anyway. Or Elon Musk would send an email to everybody in the federal government and say, if you don't respond to this, you're fired. And their agency heads would say, if you don't respond to this, you're fired. And their agency heads would say, actually, don't respond to that email. We're dealing with that. But all through that, I mean, as recently as I think it was last week, right, when that cabinet, when Trump had a public meeting of the cabinet, I mean, Trump used that meeting with all of his cabinet secretaries on hand and the press in the room. He used it to very publicly throw his weight further behind Elon, right? I mean, Elon was the one who talked the most, even though he is not in the cabinet. And basically, the job of the cabinet secretaries there was for Trump to throw to them and say,

hey, does anybody have a problem with what Elon's doing? And for them to kind of say, oh, we love it and kind of clap for him and stuff. And so that was all happening. But meanwhile, you know, already then you had started to see these these stories of Musk going way too far and cutting like insane things that were insane. Let me just let me just read one of these stories, which happened today. OK, this is just today. And we'll get to the fact that this happens like several times a day because that's what your morning shots is about. But the story today in the post, which really if you just read it, it's just absolutely remarkable to think that this is happening.

But they basically get notes from an internal Social Security Administration meeting in which the newly installed head of the SSA, Leland Dudick, basically admits that things have gotten out of control, out of his control, frankly, because of Doge. The quote that he says to a group of advocates is, quote, things are currently operating in a way I have never seen in government before. I'm laughing because it's like petrifying. He referred to the Doge team as, quote, outsiders who are unfamiliar with nuances of SSA programs. He goes on, Doge people are learning and they will make mistakes, but we have to let them see what is going on at SSA. I am relying on longtime career people to inform my work, but I am receiving decisions that are made without my input. I have to effectuate those decisions. If you step back and you think

about that, the guy who's running the retirement program for our country, the social insurance retirement program for our country is saying he can't control a group of 20 something outsiders who are cutting programs and discriminating that they don't know anything about. Like that's totally insane. I know we say about everything, but that's totally insane. Yeah. And, and Musk's personal philosophy on all this stuff has been, I mean, it's, it's been like the kind of move fast and break things. We say that phrase like 20 times a day. Now that's the ethos he's brought to all of this. And, and, and his basic problem is like, well, what's the, his basic argument has always been, well, what's the downside? Because if we cut anything that

turns out to have been load bearing, people will just tell us, that's what you're there for is to tell us what went wrong and we'll just put it right back. So what's the problem? And obviously, you know, we've, we've talked until we're blue in the face already about all of the ways in which that breaks down, all of the ways in which you, it is much easier to break these things kind of thoughtlessly than it is to try to break these things kind of thoughtlessly than it is to try to piece them back together which is true of most things most things in life most things in the world um can't just like smash a vase and then be like well just unsmash it um and uh buy a new vase right right and then meanwhile you know it's been kind of a lagging

indicator but like every one of these stories that has come out has kind of built up this, this drag on these guys where people are mad. They're, you know, they're waylaying their Republican representatives at their town hall meetings. I mean, you see it just in, just in the public opinion polling of Trump overall, and certainly of, of Musk and Doge, which has lagged behind the popularity of Trump overall. But, but Doge has been like the main thing that's been in the news for Trump for weeks and weeks. I know. And that's the thing. It's like all these lawmakers are – I mean it's very evident to me that – and we could get to this story yesterday in the Post. It's the lawmakers who are complaining about this. And the political story on this cabinet meeting is – it does reference the fact that it was John Thune, the Senate Majority Leader, who went on CNN and said they got to dial it back a little bit. Doge is going about this and doing the big scrub, but now that you've got, this is why

we work so hard to get cabinet people in place, is hand it off to these leaders, these managers who are going to be making decisions and they're going to be, I think, probably better attuned. That was what prompted this. But like today, for instance, Bill Huizenga, a Republican in Michigan, it's reported that he's asking people to stop calling his office because there's so much backlash. Republicans have said, oh, these are all Democratic plans. If you just go to an open forum right now. Why? Because we've seen this movie before.

George Soros funded groups and others literally pay protesters. At the same time, they're advising their own lawmakers to stop holding town hall meetings. Like clearly people are agitated about this. Today, Lisa Murkowski said she heard from officials in Alaska who work with USAID and were like, what's happening there is a travesty. And so all this stuff is building up. And Trump doesn't respond to a lot of things but he does respond to the sense that something unpopular is happening underneath them yeah yeah lines on graphs mean a lot to donald trump right like a line pointing up is a cause for celebration and a line pointing down

is a right i don't know if you're being facetious but i think that i do believe that yes popularity goes this way he's like fuck right like did you, I don't, we could do a whole different video on this. Did you see the graph that the president of Mexico showed him today that like made him super happy and got him to yank the tariffs off? No, it wasn't. It's exactly that. It's a line pointing down graph. Big, big, big in the brain of Donald Trump. But seriously, I mean, like this is the kind of thing. And so Trump is getting all this input from all these different people. He is seeing these kind of signals that matter to him. And I think there is a degree of like and to what with all this. It's not like there's an enormous amount of upside for him personally in making all this happen.

Especially because he's the guy who could care less about cutting government programs. He's not intellectually or philosophically stimulated by this stuff. He doesn't care. If anything, he wants to make sure that social security is functioning, right? Like he believes firmly that he needs to keep the social safety intact. So if a story pops up that the SSA is, you know, doing automated call centers and wait times are now two hours and that, you know, the guy who's administering the program doesn't have any clue what's going on, you know, Trump to a degree is going to be like, that's not good for me. Like my people depend on that. He's the one who said he didn't want Medicaid cut. Yeah. Yeah. Don't touch it. Like he did. That's what he, that's where his head's at. Yeah. Yeah. And the

really interesting thing to me in all of this, and this is something that Jamie brought up before we even started the call is is like ordinarily, Donald Trump has a playbook for something like this. Like things start to go wrong. The guy who he thinks is responsible is going to kind of fall out of his favor. Eventually he'll put all this in. But he can't fire Elon.

And send him out in the wilderness. But that's the problem. That's the problem. Elon is his own thing, right? He's kind of a- Too big to fire. Yeah, yeah. And there's never really been anybody like that

in Trump's orbit before. So it's weird in that way. He certainly cannot put too big to fire. Yeah. Yeah. And there's never really been anybody like that in Trump's orbit before. So it's weird in that way. Well, certainly cannot put Elon out to pasture. I don't think he's like fully lost confidence in him or anything. There's one person in his orbit. Who's that? Ivanka. Couldn't fire his daughter.

Yeah, that's true. Did he ever want to fire her? Or Jared, I guess. That would have been awkward. Right. Right. What's Jared up to these days? We don't hear a whole lot from Jared in the second. Shaking downis getting some money um all right on elon so then what happens next i mean

like he's gonna do his thing right like that's the thing i'm not totally sold yet that this is like a breaker to motion i think um i don't know if i'm ready to go that far because i feel like one elon's not the type of guy who's gonna be be like, okay, I'm going to move on back to Tesla. But two, I think Trump kind of wants to project this idea that he's bringing Elon back a little bit, reining him in. But I actually don't think he cares all that much about this stuff. And because he doesn't care about that stuff, I don't think he's going to take practical steps to make Elon stop doing these things.

No, I think that's exactly right. I think that's why what comes next is really interesting and could go a few different ways. Because in theory, you could imagine a world where Elon takes the slap on the wrist, is willing to step back into this advisory role.

There's all kinds of reasons why they could strategically want that anyway. Russell Vogt is coming in at OMB and is going, and is trying to like systematize a lot of this stuff. House Republicans and Senate Republicans are talking about, you know, a rescission package to make some of these cuts like permanent as a matter of law. So like you could have Elon doing his stuff now, and then all these other guys come in to backfill his work. But this is a guy who doesn't take direction is is so used to being his own boss i mean like that's the reason why this has gone the way it has so far right because like he's just gonna go in he's gonna monkey with what he wants

to monkey with he's gonna turn everything into like a pure power play in his favor the same way donald trump always does there's another two of these guys who are like not quite parallel anymore right the lines sort of intersect in a weird way and it's not clear how all that's gonna kinda bounce out. If Donald Trump's, if Trump wants an offer