The NPR Politics Podcast - DOGE's Quest To Reshape Government Continues

Episode Date: February 13, 2025

The unit, led by Elon Musk, has run into legal obstacles as it continues its rapid efforts to change the way the federal government functions. We look at the latest developments.This episode: White House correspondents Asma Khalid and Franco Ordoñez, and State Department correspondent Michele Kelemen.The podcast is produced by Bria Suggs & Kelli Wessinger, and edited by Casey Morell. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Alan from Bristol, Wisconsin. I'm currently in the hospital waiting for my cochlear implant surgery to start after experiencing sudden hearing loss and becoming deaf in my left ear. This podcast was recorded at 1244 p.m. Eastern Time on Thursday, February 13th of 2025. Things may have changed by the time you hear it, but soon I'll be able to hear it in both ears again. Okay, here's the show. Oh gosh, well I wish you a speedy recovery.

Yes, congratulations. Also congratulations on your excellent Wisconsin accent. Here's the show. It feels like upper Midwest home. I love it. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the White House.

And I'm Danielle Kertslabe but I also cover the White House. And today on the show, we're looking at President Trump's efforts to radically remake the federal government. It starts in many ways with DOJ. We all probably know that that is the entity led by Elon Musk that is digging into federal operations and purportedly trying to cut costs. Earlier today, Musk spoke via video at a forum in Dubai about what Doge's ambitions are. Well, there's a few ways to describe it, but the actions end up being the same, which is like reducing the size of government and making the government much more accountable

to the people, I think is going to lead to a better outcome for the people. You know, what I've said is that we really have here rule of the bureaucracy, as opposed to rule of the people democracy. Well, to make sense of this all and to make sense of this moment, we're joined today by a special guest, our colleague Shannon Bond.

She's been reporting on government restructuring and all things DOJ for NPR. And Shannon, it is such a treat to have you with us. I'm always happy to be here. I know. A lot has happened, I should say, since when we talked to you just last week. So frequent guest, I should say. But walk us through some of the more recent developments. It really feels at this point there is sort of a little part of the federal government

in terms of federal agencies that DOJ has not touched. Just today we're beginning to hear about layoffs now happening at federal agencies, which is of course like one of the big promises they've made. We just heard Ilan there talking about reducing the size of the federal government. President Trump signed an executive order this week making very clear that he is telling agencies that they need to be downsizing, they need to be constraining hiring. And we're seeing this across agencies. One of the ones I've been reporting on this week is the General Services Administration, which is probably the most boring agency in DC.

Okay. Yeah. Tell us, what do they do? Well, they manage a lot of federal real estate, they do a lot of contracting, you know, for things like supplies and like technology across the federal government, you know, it's a lot of kind of like the pipes that kind of make things work in Washington and also beyond, you know, in agencies and offices around the country. And staffers there have been told to brace for really steep cuts, They're talking about slashing costs across the agency. So that would include employee salaries as well as the contracts they do and other projects

by as much as 50%. And so this has all been moving very quickly. And frankly, despite Elon Musk's claims, not a lot of transparency into what is actually being cut, who is making these decisions, and ultimately what that will mean for the services that many of these agencies provide. Well, I do want to follow up there on something you just said, Shannon, which is who are some of the folks making these recommendations within Doge to President Trump? I mean, presumably these are recommendations, right?

And Trump ultimately has the final say on whether or not to reshape government, as Doge is suggesting? Well, it seems that he actually has just sort of turned over a lot of power, both to Musk himself, but also, you know, there are sort of Doge-aligned folks who have been, in many cases, installed in the leadership of these agencies, right? So we've seen that at the Office for Personnel Management. We've seen that at the Office of Management and Budget, at CFPB, and at Treasury, where we're seeing people in many cases aligned with Musk. Some of these are other leaders in tech who are coming in and kind of taking the reins of these agencies. But then the thing that has gotten much more attention, right, are these more junior people

who have been given a lot of control. These are software engineers, many of whom have worked at Musk's companies, have ties to Musk, or also have ties to Peter Teel, one of the other PayPal co-founders who's been a long, long time ally of Musk. And these are software engineers who are going into agencies and being given really kind of unprecedented access to technical systems and to information about the workforce in these agencies. You know, we've heard about people being called into interviews, you know, with representatives of DOGE. Sometimes they're not giving their full names.

It's not always clear exactly what their positions are. Like, do they work for the agency? Do they work for this DOGE organization? They're interviewing people about their jobs, what they do, and folks that we have talked to and say sort of they feel the clear implication is they're sort of having to like audition to keep their jobs. Danielle Pletka I just want to jump in and add that DOGE stands for Department of Government Efficiency. It is not a cabinet department. And this gets

at something that Shannon is saying, which is when you look at the Department of Energy, HHS, any of these other departments, the heads of them get confirmed by the Senate. High ranking people in the government are political appointees. They are approved by the Senate. But Elon Musk and his deputies were not approved. That is a major difference from other departments. And this presumably raises a lot of questions about transparency. And, you know, Doge has promised that its actions would be transparent and accessible to the public. In fact, I want you all to take a listen to White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt just yesterday at the White House.

President Trump and Elon Musk have been incredibly transparent on what Doge is doing. There is an ex-account with the Doge handle. They are tweeting out what they are doing on a daily basis. They have a website where they are posting the receipts of the contracts that they are reviewing and the payments that they have stopped from going out the door. The secretaries of our departments have stopped from going out the door. So Danielle? Are they actually being transparent? No.

I was in the press briefing room yesterday as Caroline Leavitt was saying that and I had my laptop on my lap and I was looking at the Doge website. As of the time of the briefing yesterday, there was nothing there beyond the Doge logo. And this is something Musk had claimed in that Oval Office meeting the day before, right, where he had said this stuff is on the website. So then after the press briefing, I asked a White House spokesperson, okay, what did Caroline mean? And they told me that she actually meant the DOGE X account, the X account for the Department

of Government Efficiency. Well, this is not transparency in the sense of actually putting out all of the information. This is putting out the information that they want to put out, right? They are tweeting out the stuff that they want to tweet out. This is not a spreadsheet of here is who, what, why we have canceled. And after all of this discussion and questioning about the Doge website yesterday, the Doge website did change by the end of the day. By the end of the day, they had added had added first of all on the main website a feed of the Doge X account But there's also a savings tab you can click on I am looking at it right now

Caroline Levitt had promised quote-unquote receipts yesterday Well, if you click on savings it says receipts coming soon no later than Valentine's Day And there is a festive heart emoji with an arrow through it. So, presumably in the next couple of days, we're going to see some receipts, but we don't know what that's gonna look like. All right, well, on that note, let's take a quick break and we'll be back in a moment.

And we're back. And Danielle, on the question of transparency, I wanna ask you about this extremely unusual moment that we witnessed in the Oval Office this week. And that is when Elon Musk appeared next to Donald Trump and took a whole bunch of questions from reporters. Some would argue in defense of the administration, well, hey, isn't that transparent? Sure. They put him forward and he answered questions. But a lot of what he was doing was making the case for Doge and saying, hey, Doge is super great. He was talking about why Doge

is doing what it's doing and why it's so wonderful, saying that the U.S. is not a democracy, it's a bureaucracy and that these unelected bureaucrats are running your government, the irony being that he is unelected and his deputies are unelected, but also ticking through this list of waste, fraud, and abuse that he has purportedly found, talking about someone who is 150 years old and still receiving Social Security payments, for example, that sort of thing. But we have not seen receipts. And so his appearance raised a lot of questions, even while answering some reporter questions. I want to add here, I mean, so one of the things we can ask is like, why do we care

so much about transparency here, right? So like, you know, obviously, there's the initial answer of like, this is the federal government, like, yes, we sort of we do want to know kind of what they're deciding to spend money on, what they're deciding not to spend money on, what these changes are. There's also the issue of specifically transparency around Elon Musk. As Danielle said, he was unelected. He has been made a special government employee, which means that he has this sort of brief window to work for the federal government. But at the same time, he runs six companies, many of which are government contractors, including SpaceX, the rocket company, many of which are under investigation by federal agencies, including the Department of Transportation looking at Tesla.

And so there are some real questions here about if Musk is exerting what seems like pretty significant control over agencies, which include agencies that regulate his businesses, where are the conflict of interest here? And we just have not really seen any sort of true transparency around that. I mean, Musk and Trump have both said basically, Musk is going to police his own conflict of interest. He'll decide when he needs to recuse himself. But there's no sort of public accountability for that. He does need to file disclosure forms. But the White House has said those are not going to be made public. And then also DOJ itself is an office that's been put under the executive office of the

president. And the DOJ spokesperson has said that means it is subject to presidential records, which means basically it gets to be shielded from things like Freedom of Information Act requests for quite a long time after the Trump administration. And so again, like our ability to actually see the work that is being done by this team that Musk has created here, it's just really, there's just a lot of questions about like what we're actually going to be able to find out about the decision making process. And back to your question, Asma, like who is making these decisions?

Asma Khatari It sounds like all of this is so unprecedented. And yet, Shannon, as quickly and as swiftly as Doge has been moving, a number of these steps have been put on hold by federal courts, right? I mean, talk to us about that. Yeah, there have been just like a slew of lawsuits challenging what they're doing. But you know, they are getting some pushback. A lot of these cases, though, are going to take a while to roll out. And in the meantime, we are seeing kind of the impact of the actions in terms of the kinds of access Musk and his team have more broadly, as well as like, you

know, just the kind of what they're doing in terms of effectively stopping the work at many of these agencies. Danielle, what are you hearing from the White House in response to these legal challenges? Well, yesterday at the press briefing, White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt got very strident about this. She, first of all, chastised the press for saying that there might be a constitutional crisis happening right now. And she turned that back on the president's opponents. She said, quote, "'The real constitutional crisis is taking place within our judicial branch, where district court judges and liberal districts across the country are abusing their power to unilaterally

block President Trump's basic executive authority. And we should add here that Trump always said he was going to shake up government while he's doing it. And he said he would bring Elon Musk on, and well, Elon Musk is doing it. And Elon Musk himself made that case in the Oval Office the other day himself, saying, the people voted for this, we're just doing what they want. Elon Musk himself made that case in the Oval Office the other day himself, saying, the people voted for this. We're just doing what they want. All right. Well, that is a wrap for today's conversation. Shannon,

thank you very much as always. Thanks for having me. I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the White House. And I'm Danielle Kurtz-Levitt. And I also cover the White House. And thank you all, as always, for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.