Elon Musk and his team have taken a hacksaw to the federal bureaucracy one agency at a time, and the question has become whether he’s on a crusade that will leave the government paralyzed or deliver a shake-up it has needed for years.Jonathan Swan, a White House reporter for The New York Times, takes us inside this hostile takeover of Washington.Guests: Jonathan Swan, a White House reporter for The New York Times.Background reading: Inside Mr. Musk’s aggressive incursion into the federal government.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Photo: Mike Segar/Reuters Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Full Episode
From The New York Times, this is The Daily. I'm Rachel Abrams. Today, Elon Musk and his team have taken a hacksaw to the federal bureaucracy one agency at a time. And the question has become whether he's on a crusade that will leave the government paralyzed or deliver exactly the kind of shakeup it's needed for years.
My colleague, Jonathan Swan, takes us inside this hostile takeover of Washington. It's Wednesday, February 5th. So, Jonathan, we always understood that Elon Musk was going to be important in this administration in the second Trump presidency.
Trump had given the group that Musk was put in charge of, the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE as it's commonly known, the job of shrinking the entire federal government. But the question was always just how much power Musk would actually have as a private citizen operating outside the president's cabinet.
And over the past few days, we've actually started to get an answer, which is a whole lot of power.
Yes, his power is extraordinary. He effectively is unaccountable. Donald Trump has fully empowered him to roam across the federal government, get inside the pipes of the federal government, look at the payment systems and the databases to embed inside these agencies. Right. So this is not some...
chin-stroking professor doing an analysis of government from the outside and, you know, let me sit down at my table and write you some recommendations. You know, Walter Isaacson wrote a biography about Elon Musk where people who know him talk about, quote-unquote, demon mode, which he goes into, which is this sort of manic energy, staying up all night, sleeping on the floor of the factory. He's
Twitter, setting unrealistic deadlines, doing mass layoffs because he thinks stuff aren't hardcore enough. He's effectively trying to do that to the federal government. His team have moved beds into agency offices. He has an office space in the West Wing. And he also has been working out of this opulent Secretary of War suite in the Eisenhower Executive Office building.
And he's brought with him this cohort from Silicon Valley, people who've worked for him at Tesla and SpaceX, and he's installed them in some of the most important parts of government. So this is Elon Musk getting his hands into government, doing what he's done at these companies. And remember, we should say he's been in the private sector, probably the singular entrepreneur, of our lifetime.
But if you understand what he's done with his business, he is marked by incredible risk-taking, extreme risk-taking, and a willingness to, if he or his employees consider regulations or laws to be quote-unquote dumb, he pushes them, and particularly at SpaceX, to defy those regulations, just do it anyway. And If people want to sue, so be it.
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