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We stand on the verge of the four greatest years in the history of Make America Great. How can you be against it? Elon Musk's days in the federal government may be limited or maybe not. He slashed and burned through American government departments and jobs through his work at Doge. He's seen his company Tesla's profits plummet and Tesla showrooms protested. So if and when Elon Musk does leave, what happens to Doge and his relationship with President Trump? We'll talk about it today on Sidebar from The Washington Post. I'm your host, Libby Casey, and I'm with James Homan, editorial writer and columnist and J.M. Rieger, senior video journalist who covers politics. Elon Musk was never expected to stay in government service forever.
JM, let's talk about how it's always been intended to be time limited and why. Yeah, Musk was brought in as what's known as a special government employee. And what that means is that he has a limited amount of time, 130 days technically. And but that means he doesn't have to go through the whole financial disclosure and kind of ethics divestment process that a normal government employee would have to do. Administrations have used this for years for various administrations. But the way that the Trump administration is using Musk in this role has been unusual from the start, just in terms of what he's being used for in the U.S. service. But on top of that, what is strange is we don't know for sure the end date of that.
30 days from inauguration. I mean, how hard is that to figure out? I can read a calendar pretty easily. Yes, yes. It's gray because straight up, the inauguration was January 20th. So that would mean his service is done. His 130 days are done in May. But the Trump administration didn't announce that he was a special government employee until early February. And there's been sort of implications by the administration that maybe he's working some days and those days count and then other days don't count. So it is very, very murky. And on top of that, you have Musk this week suggesting that he may stay as long as the entire Trump term, the entire four years. Just on a sort of a limited part-time basis, right? I mean, so we don't actually know what his official start date was? We don't.
And we don't know how they're counting days. We don't. But we do know he's not technically in charge of the Doge service. We know that something like 60 people who have affiliations with him have ended up in the government in various capacities. We know some of them have already left, that their government email accounts have been deactivated. But we also know that every day there's some news story about a Doge person that we haven't heard of before popping up at the National Gallery of Art, wanting to talk to people. Or last week it was wanting to have a Zoom meeting with someone who was...
used to get a grant from the Justice Department and their grant had been canceled and a Doge person asked for a meeting with them. And they set up this meeting. I was like, we don't even have this grant anymore. So there's still kind of stuff happening. I mean, a person close to Elon said that Elon is like a rocket and he's taken Doge into like space. And so he's done the propulsion of kind of basically shattering things. And now he's going to leave basically picking up the pieces to others, even as he transitions to what he said on this call with shareholders will be one or two days a week.
in the government. Let's talk about that shareholder call because we did get some insight there. So we saw Tesla's earnings report and it did not look good, James. 71% drop in profits, 9% decline in revenue for the first quarter. Sales have also slipped dramatically in the start of this year. So what was Musk's message to investors? That he's going to spend a lot more time in the boardroom and less time in D.C. He already is in D.C. less. And a lot of this pressure on the company, the stock price is down almost in half, 40-something percent since the inauguration. It's basically close to where it was at the time of the election.
Tesla is facing really competitive pressure from Build Your Dream, BYD, this electric car maker in China. Americans don't see their cars because they can't sell them here, but I was in Mexico in February and they were everywhere. And then at the same time, Elon's customer base for Tesla in the US has soured on him because they don't like his right-wing style of politics. So he's sort of squeezed and finds himself needing to turn his attention back to the business. We'll talk more about Tesla in a little bit, but the investor's call was revealing and he did say, I'm pulling back, but he also said he might still be around a few days a week or one or two days a week. And that's what caught your ear, JM, because you're saying he could stick around kind of endlessly. Right, or at least he's saying so, right?
Like, how would that even work? Do we know? We don't know. But what we do know is that Trump in this White House has been willing to push the envelope on everything so far. So there's no reason to suspect they wouldn't try and necessarily push the envelope on this. I think the real question is actually whether Trump wants him there come later this year or if Elon's words are to be believed three or four years from now. Let's hear how President Trump was just speaking about Elon Musk. And I want you to listen to the verb tense. OK, go back to your, like, eighth grade grammar lessons. Past, present, future tense. Listen to the verb tense. I can't speak.
more highly about any individual. He's an incredible guy. He's a brilliant guy. He's a wonderful person. And he was a tremendous help, both in the campaign and in what he's done with Doge. I also know that he was treated very unfairly by the, I guess you call it the public, by some of the public, not by all of it. Okay, so we're talking about past tense. I mean, he's talking about him and his government service as though it's done, James.
Trump has told associates that he's sort of happy with Elon transitioning away. He does not want any kind of public rupture. Musk has actually promised to give $100 million to a Trump line super PAC. That money has not yet materialized. Trump certainly doesn't want to do anything before he gets that money. And part of it is proximity to power, continuing to have access. Musk has been publicly and privately very critical of the tariffs and has felt like he can't get through to people. So on the other hand, Trump continues to bring Musk to his club and spend time with him. So he just may exercise influence other ways than sort of an official side, official role. So if Musk phases out of Doge, you know, James had this.
image of like the rocket that musk has launched i mean there is some truth to that in the sense that doge has like busted its way in to all of these networks some of which are sensitive networks and data through stockpiles within the federal government and they have done that through sheer you know sort of brazen just doing it with elon musk on the phone pushing to have it done so in that sense like has he accomplished that and so now he can step back and let for the lower level people uh continue the work i think there's two ways of looking at how successful musk and doge have been so far how effective they've been one is Tens of thousands of federal employees are now out of work. The federal government has been reshaped. We've seen entire agencies programs just gutted. And I think it's going to take us years potentially to really figure out the full effect. Because as James was just mentioning, Doge is in all parts of the federal government essentially at this point. And they are still planning cuts even if and when Musk officially leaves here. On the other hand, though, Musk came in promising sweeping cuts that the federal budget would be cut in a third upwards of a half, that the deficit would be dramatically reduced. And over the past six months here, he's repeatedly.
downgraded that number. He's repeatedly changed it. In October, he said that he would cut $2 trillion from the federal budget. That's greater than the amount of discretionary spending in a federal budget. So it was never going to happen. Discretionary spending is something you choose to spend. Yes, exactly. So we're not talking about like Social Security, but everything else. So everything from...
if you cut every single dollar from the federal budget that's that does not go to social security medicare programs like that you'd only get to about 1.7 1.8 trillion so 2 trillion was never going to happen but that's what he promised in october by the time we got to january he was promising a trillion dollars of cuts and now earlier this month at a cabinet meeting he says we're going to cut in fiscal year 2026 this upcoming year 150 billion dollars it's a dramatic reduction from what musk was promising and 150 billion dollars is less than what the trump administration how trump administration has increased spending so far from the first Three, four months of the year, the Trump administration compared to this time last year in the Biden administration has increased federal spending by $154 billion. So the numbers are just not, the math is not mapping. So they've limited the goal to cut, but they are still making massive changes to the United States government. There's so much focus on $150 billion and how do you get there? Did he get there? But that's actually not the way that Doge is most worrisome or problematic. It is the collection of data. They have gotten in brazenly to 80 different systems. They've collected some of the most sensitive, intimate.
information about people's lives, health claims, for example, social security, and they have taken all this information and they're mostly trying to use it IRS taxpayer data to aid with the deportation effort. Trump wants to deport a million people this year. But there are a lot of questions and they're being asked by people like Steve Bannon, who are saying who has access to all this data, everything has been sort of compiled into one place. And Steve Bannon this week is publicly saying there should be a full audit to make sure that Elon and his friends don't end up with all this incredibly sensitive information, which frankly, government contracting you could use for commercial advantage. And so the cuts are significant, especially for the people who lost their jobs. But I think that data access doesn't get enough attention, because it's not kind of the shiny thing, but they have this trove. And that's it's such an important point, because we got to keep in mind, Elon has not divested from anything, he is still running in his words, something like 17 jobs or companies, whatever he says.
all of those conflicts of interest and all and a lot of those have government contracts. So he's in here in all different parts of the federal government. And his companies are relying on payments from the government to operate in some cases. And the conflicts of interest thing has never really gotten enough attention. I mean, one of the places that he did cut deep was the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. And he was angry because they were essentially regulating Tesla and calling out Tesla for serious problems. And he basically went in through Doge and just like massively cut that agency. And he obviously has an interest in, you know,
defanging it in his part of what he's promising right now is self-driving cars. That's exactly that intersection. Totally. So if Musk does phase out to some degree or entirely, let's talk more about what that will mean for Doge. You mentioned that he's not officially running it. Who are the important players right now to be watching? Who may step up? So Russ Vogt, who is the very controversial director of the Office of Management and Budget, one of the architects of Project 2025, longtime congressional staffer, real like MAGA original. He is basically.
supposed to be inheriting kind of the mantle of Doge. I was talking to a prominent Republican who joked about Russ that Russ thinks that winning a fight is the same as starting it, that he likes to pick fights and that there's not a lot of follow through. And so this person was sort of pessimistic that he'll actually follow through on a lot of this stuff. But he's someone who, in contrast, Elon Musk actually does understand how to pull the various levers of government. has spent the last four years really thinking it through in a way that Elon with his 17 jobs and how many of her kids has not had the bandwidth to. One of the things that's sort of a mess now is this email that people are supposed to send if they work in the federal government of five things they did this week. That's sort of falling apart. I mean, it was always complicated. And for so many reasons about disclosing who is reading the emails, what are you disclosing? Are you disclosing sensitive information? Tell us more, Jam. Our colleagues here at The Post had a really terrific story on this going into...
details on how this five things email that was announced and it was basically sent to all federal employees and it sounds easy enough we can all say five things we did this i think so we did but it was it was really fraught yes and and these emails which are still going on by the way they are still sending them each week and employees are expected to respond to them but they're kind of just going into the ether no one knows who's reading them if they're even being read and there's a wide range of responses some employees federal employees we reported are not responding at all and some are facing consequences for that some are not facing consequences for that some are using ai to respond chat gbt or for example some are responding in foreign languages right there's a whole gambit of responses And it's really unclear kind of what is the ultimate goal with this. The goal was to root out people who were dead, like who weren't actually existing, which like, isn't that what middle management is for to make sure your employees aren't dead? Let's go back to what James was just saying, which is Musk has a habit here of just kind of pie in the sky, really pronouncing things. And then there's not always follow through on that. And that's kind of been, you know, a little, again, a little bit of doge, but there has been some real tangible impacts on the federal government.
Let's talk about clashes that Musk has been involved in. Just a shocking story from Axios this week, from Mark Caputo, talking about a screaming match between Musk and Scott Besant that was overheard by people in the Oval Office. And Georgia Maloney. Did you know you can play the Washington Post's games for free? Find the crossword, keyword, ridges, and on the record in the Washington Post app or at WashingtonPost.com slash games. No subscription required.
I mean, imagine going to visit a foreign country. You're being hosted in the, you know, the premier seat of power of that country. And you hear people like screaming at each other. That's a stereotype. The Italians are yellers. They feel like they're used to it. There's a time and a place, James. There's a time and a place for the yelling. And there's a time and a place for the cheek kissing. And there's a time and a place to do it in another room. So what do we know? So the Washington Post has confirmed this reporting now. And basically, there has been a lot of tension going back. I don't want to go too far back. But Elon Musk pushed Trump really hard to pick Howard Lutnick as Treasury Secretary. Trump ended up going with Scott Besant. So they've never quite gotten along. And Besant is a very mild-mannered.
guy in public. But he has just been getting increasingly frustrated by Musk has just caused lots of headaches. The big one that really caused this blow up was last week, Musk went behind Besant's back to install this guy, Gary Shapely, as the acting IRS commissioner. And the IRS is part of the Treasury Department. And this was done without Besant's knowledge. Besant had lobbied Trump to pick his deputy to be acting director. And so Besant went to the White House, got this undone. And so now I think the IRS has actually had like five leaders since the inauguration. But this led to a blow up in the Oval. Elon and Besant were going at it in front of Trump. And then
Trump sort of ended the meeting. And then in the hallway outside the Oval Office, they went out at Moore, there were F-bombs used. And when Besant was yelling at Elon, Elon was saying, yell it louder. And they were basically getting in each other's face. And then the ultimate insult is after this, Musk went and unfollowed Scott Besant on X, his platform. And so it's, I mean, and then that night, Laura Loomer, the kind of the...
person we've talked about she started attacking besant uh and extraordinarily fringe exactly fringe person oh goodness i know we've talked about her on the show before musk quote tweeted her it was like interesting because and then so i guess before in this meeting um uh musk called besant a soros plant because he used to manage george soros's money and he said he was a failed hedge fund manager and then besant shot back and this is in front of trump and says you've over promised and under delivered you actually haven't done anything that you said you were going to do uh and what's wild is this is just the latest in a bunch of clashes where elon musk as the world's richest man has sort of had this YOLO mentality of he's just willing to fight with all these people. And it has ultimately hurt him. It has. And, you know, I would go back a month to really kind of the turning point on Musk starting to lose influence, if you will, and kind of Trump's orbit, which is when he had to blow up with Rubio.
Secretary of State and also Sean Duffy, Secretary of Transportation in a cabinet meeting where there was also a shouting match because, again, Musk was going around their backs to kind of put his fingers in the pie in their agencies. And after that, Trump goes and posts on True Social after this gets leaked out and reported and basically says that the secretaries of these different agencies are the ultimate deciders in so many words. I'm heavily paraphrasing here. But that at that point, it's like an appeasing message. Yes, yes. And Trump uses this word. We're going to use a scalpel, not a hatchet in terms of these cuts. And that was widely seen at the time as sort of a rebuke of Musk in the way that he had approached things. And to James's point, this is really the latest blow up with with Besson and with.
musk here this week in the white house and is really emblematic of kind of the latest manifestation of how he's lost influence the other big clash uh is with peter navarro the trade advisor musk's business is hurting because of the tariffs uh you think oh teslas are made in the u.s but a lot of the pieces of them are imported and it hurts the whole business and he has a lot of business interest in china um the other big turning point that kind of pushed trump away was uh it leaked out in the media that uh musk was going to get a war briefing a briefing on the war plan at the pentagon with hegseth that actually we know really angered Trump. Even Trump said that's a conflict of interest. He has all these defense contracts. It's not fair for him to know what the war plan is. And so Trump basically pulled back that briefing. It's funny to watch how different people have handled him. So Doug Burgum at the Interior Department has actually kind of tried to welcome Doge in and they bake him cookies. They like their Doge guy, you know, they basically co-opted him. And they're, you know, and they've said, Oh, yeah, we're with you. And so it's interesting who's clashed with who and some of it's
musk is sporadically dealing with the different agencies and he's in and out and he has different people something more aggressive than others and so it's i mean it has been a mess there was a someone quoted in a post story that went up today that said uh you know elon is sort of like when you're going through chemotherapy and if you if you believe that the government has sort of riddled you know his cancer in it uh elon has killed a lot of the cancer but he's also killed quite a lot of healthy cells and A lot of these Trump nominees have found themselves trying to protect the healthy cells. James, you cracked me up when you said it's the enemies you make along the way, right? That's sort of the legacy he's leaving as he does his tour of the federal government. Let's talk more about the costs, which you both touched on. J.M., you talked about how much they're claiming they can save, how they've really shrunk that number down dramatically. But let's talk about the cost that it's meant to the federal workforce and give us some examples that stand out to you. And we've had excellent reporting from our colleagues, especially Hannah Natanson, who's been just...
tirelessly going through all these different agencies in the federal government. It's not like there's like a database somewhere that you can track this stuff. I don't even know how Doge tracks this stuff, frankly. But let's talk about some of the costs. And there's so many errors in how Doge is tracking it as well. The big thing to me, one of the big things that stands out is how they've slow walked, they being Doge, they've slow walked these federal grants. So this is health research. These are education grants, research grants. If you're in the middle of a medical trial and all of a sudden the funding is frozen for a period of time.
the trial potentially gets permanently derailed, even if the funding comes back. So in some of these cases, the money's being frozen and maybe it's being unfrozen later, but there's been real damage done in that time. And I go back to also how they froze, they accidentally, in Musk's words, froze Ebola funding, then brought that back online. These things are having real world impacts. We talked about USAID for at least the first month or two of the Trump administration, just the gutting of that, the work that that agency was doing. And also there's education stuff of early childhood, monitoring of childhood abuse, Head Start program, other things like that that have real tangible impacts. And the last thing I'll say is,
They've been in working on the website at Social Security. That website has been down repeatedly for folks trying to get on, access information, access their benefit information. And at an absolute minimum, I think you can say that it has really worried Americans who are trying – and this is showing up in polling – who are trying to just go on and get clear information about things. And the waters have been so muddied at this point by kind of their approach, their move fast, break things, Silicon Valley approach to all of this, that at an absolute minimum, I think that – you know, it's safe to say based on the polling that confidence in the government has not risen so far under Trump. And we've seen real impacts of these research grants, these education things, and some of the other things that are really important that the federal government does. There really has been a culture clash between Silicon Valley and Washington, but also even that Musk-Bessent blowup is really a culture clash between Silicon Valley and Wall Street, where you really run through everything and then make a very conscious decision before doing a big investment. And Musk does have this mentality that you can delete and then undo and undo. And they tried to hire back some of the nuclear safety inspectors that they had gotten rid of. One of the big consequences or costs is
probationary workers were the ones who were easiest to fire because they didn't have the same union protections. And those were the young people who were maybe tech savvier, who were getting into government. And you sort of wiped out this whole generation. And then you also offered these fork in the road emails. They offer multiple of them at different agencies. And this sounds meaner than it is, but it's true. The people who could get good jobs in the private sector.
who were most talented and most competent took the fork in the road. And the people who couldn't get jobs stayed. Or who were close to retirement. Or who were close to retirement, for whatever reason. And again, it's not everyone. There are good people who stayed. But you've had this exodus of...
extraordinarily talented federal workers. We may see more because what we're seeing now is more of these offers go out that are a little clearer. Like the first ones were so random, people were putting them as spam. But now if you're getting them from your department head or your agency head, it's like people know it's a real thing now and they can actually take it. We have to see if we can pay for all of these plans. But yeah. And so that's part of the cost is the uncertainty. It has a corrosive effect. If you're a researcher trying to decide, do you want to...
build your lab in Europe or in the United States, maybe Europe looks more attractive if you think that there's a high risk that your funding is going to get frozen. And it's also worth noting that if you were recently promoted, you were also a probationary employee. So some of the best employees, the ones who were getting promoted, were being let go as well in terms of just how kind of wild this whole process is. And the last thing I'll just say on the research point is... We've talked a lot about how Trump is really kind of reshaving the world kind of in the post-World War II, and we've seen that economically in foreign affairs, all sorts of areas. One is also in these research grants. The way that the U.S. has structured kind of the country and especially medical research over the last few decades here has been that the federal government is going to send grants to these universities. They're really going to bulk up their teams and they're going to find groundbreaking cures and other kind of medical breakthroughs. The government had long viewed that as a good thing and not sticking that into private companies the way it used to be done.
kind of pre-World War II especially. Trump is now potentially turning that on. It's still early, but potentially turning that on its head when they pull back or at least slow walk these grains because it creates so much uncertainty that even if they don't permanently pull it all back, maybe the universities or these companies start going in a different direction. I want to finish by talking about Elon Musk and Donald Trump and their story. You talked about how the relationship has hit some bumps. Where is their relationship at Big Picture James in a way that matters to the American people?
There are people close to Trump, and probably Trump himself, although I haven't heard it, who see Musk as a helpful heat shield, that he has actually taken a lot of the pressure that he became this lightning rod. And there are people who have had problems dealing with the Social Security Administration who blame Elon Musk and not Donald Trump, even though this is the Trump administration. And I do think Trump has the mentality of a disruptor who wants to break things, and Musk has broken things. And now the challenge for the next, you know, we're only 5% done with the second Trump term. Not even 100 days. Yeah, we're not even 100 days.
The challenge is rebuilding a lot of what they broke. And so, I mean, honestly, breaking things isn't that hard. Building things is hard. And Musk actually is good at building things. He did build SpaceX and Tesla, but now he's not going to be here for that next phase of trying to actually refashion the government. And you are seeing these real efforts at really reorganizing the way the government works. Marco Rubio rolled out a State Department reorganization, got rid of the Office of Human Rights this week. There's these big changes happening, and maybe they'll be more effective because instead of picking things that look good on Twitter, they're going to be picking things that actually have a transformational impact.
The big thing I think that they, there was an equation made when they first came into office here that they were going to move as quickly as possible, even without congressional buy-in, because they thought that that was the most effective way to kind of make permanent lasting change. We've seen that on the immigration front, on the tariff front. We've seen that with Doge. The risk here is that without congressional buy-in, how lasting some of these impacts in terms of the cuts, because they said that they wanted to shrink the deficit. They are really not doing that at this point. Even if this $150 billion number that they're now saying is true, that is a fraction.
of what they were previously promising. And it's really not going to make that much of a long-term dent. If you really want to shrink the deficit, you really have to tackle a lot more than that. And you really also have to start talking social security, defense, Medicare, things like that, which they really haven't gone after too much at this point. How much that changes here, I think is kind of the real question going forward. If vote comes in, knows how to pull some levers, for example, that Musk didn't know how to pull, how much does that change? How much buy-in do we see from Capitol Hill? There's saving money and then there's remaking the federal government. And they were saying they were going to do both with the money as like a shiny object to chase, but what they've done in the process is fired and offered buyouts too.
tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, potentially government employees who are now either looking for work or will be relying on federal benefits possibly as they are unemployed or they're leaving the brain drain you guys were talking about in some of these government sectors. And then we're going to see sort of how, I guess, how they put the pieces back together. Jan Rieger, James Homan, thank you so much. We broadcast on Tuesdays and Thursdays from our studios at The Washington Post. Find us on your favorite podcast app or look for us on YouTube. You can watch along with us or listen along. If you listen to podcasts on YouTube, just look for The Washington Post. See you soon.
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