Inside the Explosive Meeting Where Trump Officials Clashed With Elon Musk

 

by Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman

 

Simmering anger at the billionaire’s unchecked power spilled out in a remarkable Cabinet Room meeting. The president quickly moved to rein in Mr. Musk.

 

Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman are White House correspondents. They reported from Washington.

 

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.

 

 

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been privately furious with Mr. Musk for weeks.Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times

 

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.

 

It is unclear what the long-term impact of the meeting will be. Mr. Musk remains Mr. Trump’s biggest political financial supporter — just this week his super PAC aired $1 million worth of ads that said, “Thank you, President Trump” — and Mr. Musk’s control of the social media website X has made administration staff members and cabinet secretaries alike fearful that he will target them in public.

 

 

The cabinet meeting was the first significant indication that President Trump is willing to put some limits on Mr. Musk.Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times

 

 

 

 

 

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