After chaotically firing and then rehiring thousands of government employees, making big cuts to—and thus threatening to destroy—the most popular government program of all time (Social Security), planning cuts to funding for childhood cancer research, cutting programs for children with disabilities, threatening to make cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, attempting to dismantle an agency that saves consumers billions of dollars each year by fighting financial fraud and abuse, pushing for the firing of as many as 80,000 U.S. veterans, encouraging cuts to veteran cancer care, incessantly posting false information about its activities, and generating economic shockwaves that have recently been credited with threatening to create a new and devastating recession not seen since 2007, Donald Trump has announced that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency will begin to refine its operations somewhat as apparently the government is running much more smoothly now.
On Thursday, in a post to his Truth Social site, Trump announced that DOGE would shift gears from its “chainsaw” approach and begin downsizing the federal government with a “scalpel” instead. The post was made shortly after a cabinet meeting that sought to lay out more specific parameters for government cost-cutting.
“Now that we have my cabinet in place, I have instructed the Secretaries and Leadership to work with DOGE on Cost Cutting measures and Staffing,” Trump went on, claiming that there would be regular meetings between agency heads and the “government efficiency” team. “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.’ The combination of them, Elon, DOGE, and other great people will be able to do things at a historic level.”
“It’s very important that we cut levels down to where they should be, but it’s also important to keep the best and most productive people,” Trump said. Meetings will occur every two weeks “until that aspect of this very necessary job is done,” Trump claimed.
Musk later quote-tweeted Trump on X, noting: “Very productive meeting.”
Trump and Musk have also both recently claimed that Musk is not personally in charge of firing anybody.
One reason that Trump may be attempting to shift responsibility from Musk to internal government department heads is that a growing number of legal cases aimed at the Trump administration have begun to probe Musk’s role in the government. Those legal cases are attempting to determine whether the White House and Musk are, in fact, breaking the law and flouting the Constitution. If Musk is actually the head of DOGE, as Trump claimed in his address to Congress on Tuesday, he may be violating the Appointments Clause of the Constitution, which mandates that pivotal figures of the government must be nominated by the President and approved by Congress. Indeed, despite Musk’s vast influence over the new administration, Musk was never congressionally confirmed, and he and Trump have maintained that the billionaire is purely an “advisor” to the President and that he does not play an active role in DOGE. This is the narrative, despite the fact that Trump and Musk have both bragged repeatedly (and very publicly) that Musk is leading the effort.
In court, the government has repeatedly failed to explain Musk’s actual role in the government. In one recent court hearing, a government lawyer flailed when questioned by a federal judge as to what Elon is doing for Trump, as reported by Reuters:
“Where is Mr. Musk in all of this?” asked U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly.
“I don’t have any information beyond close adviser to the president,” responded Bradley Humphreys, an attorney for the Department of Justice.
“You can’t tell me what role he has?” the judge persisted.
Another federal judge, Theodore D. Chuang of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, recently expressed skepticism at the government’s claims that Musk is not running the show at DOGE. DOGE’s activities have increasingly been hampered by litigation, as several federal judges have deemed the government “efficiency” unit’s activities illegal and illegitimate.
Trump’s so far unsubstantiated claim that Musk doesn’t have any authority to fire workers also comes at a time when the GOP-controlled Congress is increasingly wary of DOGE and the billionaire behind it. Maybe it’s the haphazard, sloppy, borderline idiotic fashion in which DOGE has conducted its work. Maybe it’s the fact that Republican lawmakers have been getting screamed at by their own constituents over their support of DOGE. Or maybe it’s the fact that, in a few short weeks, the Trump administration has managed to put the U.S. economy in the toilet, and DOGE seems to be a big part of that. Whatever the reason, Republican lawmakers have increasingly begun to express “concern” for the government-destruction initiative carried out by Musk.
On Thursday, Politico reported that Republican congressmen were beginning to freak out about the recently announced plans to cut 80,000 jobs from the Department of Veteran Affairs. Lindsay Graham, not a man known for his keen sense of moral outrage, recently had this to say about the Trump administration’s activities: “It’s political malpractice not to consult Congress if that’s what you intend to do,” Graham said. “Maybe you’ve got a good reason to do it. I like Doug Collins—he’s a great guy. But we don’t need to be reading memos in the paper about a 20 percent cut at the VA.”
