Actual cabinet officials took a back seat to Elon Musk during the Trump administration’s first cabinet meeting on Wednesday, with President Donald Trump suggesting that any secretaries unsupportive of his Department of Government Efficiency be “thrown out.”
“It’s an honor to have you, he’s been a tremendously successful guy, he’s really working so hard,” Trump said in a sprawling hour-long press conference after the private meeting. “He’s sacrificing a lot and getting a lot of praise, I’ll tell you, but he’s also getting hit.”
“Is anybody unhappy with Elon? If you are, we’ll throw them out of here. Is anybody unhappy?” the president continued about Musk, who he tapped to lead DOGE.
No cabinet members raised objections and several applauded Musk. Few cabinet members took questions or made remarks to the assembled press, and none talked for as long as Musk.
“Some disagree a little bit,” Trump continued. “But I will tell you for the most part I think everybody is not only happy but thrilled.”
Trump’s remarks arrived after leaders at agencies like the Department of Energy and State Department directed employees to disregard an email sent by the Office of Personnel Management directing them to detail their accomplishments in the last week.
The Trump administration has tried to downplay any suggestion of a feud between Musk and the cabinet officials, with White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt arguing Tuesday that they were all working as one team. Ahead of the cabinet meeting, Trump also posted on social media.
“ALL CABINET MEMBERS ARE EXTREMELY HAPPY WITH ELON,” Trump said in his post.
At the meeting, Trump suggested that the roughly 1 million federal workers who declined to respond or were ordered not to may be fired by his administration, even as Leavitt said Tuesday that the president “respects” the decision of cabinet officials who had ordered staff not to respond.
Trump was sounding a different note.
“Those million people are on the bubble, as they say. Maybe they’re going to be gone,” Trump said. “It’s possible that a lot of those people will be actually fired, and if that happened, that’s OK, because that’s what we’re trying to do. This country has gotten bloated and fat and disgusting and incompetently run.”
Musk, who arrived at the meeting in a black MAGA hat and a shirt that read “tech support,” reiterated his hope that DOGE would yield deep cuts to the agencies led by the cabinet officials he spoke before.
“I’m confident at this point, knock on wood … we can actually find a trillion dollars in savings,” Musk said.
Trump echoed Musk.
“We’re looking to get it maybe to a trillion dollars, and we can do that, we’re going to start getting to be at a point where we can think in terms of balancing budgets,” Trump said. “They found some of the theft and fraud … and probably some fraud that we’re not going to be able to prove is fraud, but when you hear the names and the places where this money is going, it’s a disgrace.”
While Musk’s operation has claimed credit for axing billions in contracts and leases, those funds are not cut from the federal budget and remain at the agencies to which they were appropriated. And, as Musk acknowledged in his remarks Wednesday, DOGE’s slash-and-burn tactics have led to the cancellation of projects outside of his mandate of cutting “waste and fraud.”
“We will make mistakes,” Musk said. “One of the things we accidentally canceled very briefly was Ebola prevention. I think we all want Ebola prevention, so we restored the Ebola prevention.”
Republican lawmakers have increasingly taken issue with such cuts, among them the blocking of President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, funding by DOGE employees.
“If it was a mistake I get it, but if it wasn’t they need to be fired,” Rep. Tim Burchett told NOTUS of the PEPFAR cuts.
—
Mark Alfred is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow. Haley Byrd Wilt contributed reporting.