This is an adapted excerpt from the Feb. 26 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
On Wednesday, the leader of the free world presided over the first full Cabinet meeting of his new term — and Donald Trump was there, too. After a religious invocation, the Trump administration’s top yes-men and women sat politely in the Cabinet Room and waited for a chance to speak. But first, they had to hear from Elon Musk, a man wearing a MAGA hat and a novelty shirt who is running what one senator is calling an illegal operation to control the purse strings of everybody else in the room, despite being neither elected nor confirmed by the Senate.
The unelected billionaire and his extra-governmental group are slashing budgets and staffs at agencies that regulate Musk’s businesses.
“I actually just call myself the humble tech support here,” Musk said. “Because this is actually, as crazy as it sounds, that is almost a literal description of the work that the DOGE team is doing.” But when you call tech support, does the world’s richest man show up, get access to your checking and savings accounts, and threaten to cancel your scheduled payments? Because that’s what Musk and his team have been doing since Trump took office in January.
The unelected billionaire and his extra-governmental group are slashing budgets and staffs at agencies that regulate Musk’s businesses, while also getting an inside look at the departments that give his companies billions of dollars in contracts and subsidies.
After the Trump administration fired employees at the Federal Aviation Administration and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said he would allow Musk’s DOGE team to “plug in” to the agency’s aviation system, Bloomberg reported that the billionaire approved the shipment of 4,000 of his company’s Starlink internet consoles to the FAA. An FAA spokesperson later confirmed the report. That’s not just a conflict of interest, that’s helping yourself to taxpayer money.
Musk did this all while freezing lifesaving programs, like one that shipped U.S.-made fortified peanut butter to feed severely malnourished children on multiple continents. Just cartoonishly evil stuff. Kind of like Musk’s email last week to most of the country’s civil servants, telling them to respond with five things they accomplished or face termination.
While enjoying the spotlight in Wednesday’s Cabinet meeting, Musk defended that email with a truly crazy theory. “What we are trying to get to the bottom of is, we think there are a number of people on the government payroll who are dead, which is probably why they can’t respond,” Musk said. “And some people who are not real people, like, they’re literally fictional individuals that are collecting paychecks. Somebody’s collecting paychecks on a fictional individual. So we’re literally trying to figure out, are these people real? Are they alive? And can they write an email?”
Musk suggested something similar during his last White House address, when he told everyone 150-year-old people were getting Social Security checks. That turned out to be totally untrue — an incompetent, mistaken reading of the data.
But as Musk will tell you, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency isn’t perfect. DOGE has made some “oopsies” along the way. “We will make mistakes,” Musk said Wednesday. “We won’t be perfect, but when we make a mistake, we’ll fix it very quickly.”Musk then offered up an example of one of DOGE’s so-called mistakes: “With USAID, one of the things we accidentally cancelled very briefly was Ebola — Ebola prevention. I think we all want Ebola prevention. So we restored the Ebola prevention immediately.”
That is not efficiency, that is incompetence. It also doesn’t appear to be true that the mistake was fixed. Several current and former USAID officials told The Washington Post that the government’s initiatives to fight Ebola and other diseases have been gutted and not restored.
But that is just one mistake, right? It’s not as if DOGE highlighted a bunch of spending cuts on its website then quietly deleted them after learning they were riddled with errors. No, wait, that did actually happen this week. According to a New York Times analysis, DOGE triple-counted one canceled contract, took credit for $2 billion in savings that occurred under the Biden administration and even claimed to have cut an $8 billion contract that was only worth $8 million.
DOGE also fired top nuclear weapons safety workers, then realized its mistake and had trouble contacting those workers to rehire them. A mistake they managed to repeat at the Agriculture Department, where they fired experts on bird flu amid a bird flu outbreak and scurried to restore those officials to their jobs. So it’s fair to say Musk has been making a lot of mistakes. But the billionaire looks pretty unconcerned, commanding the attention of Trump and the Cabinet. Again, no one voted for this guy for office. No senator confirmed him to any post. This is just an obviously unconstitutional seizure of power. At the same time that Musk is holding the government in his hands, the White House keeps insisting he’s not the DOGE administrator. On Monday, when a judge asked the government’s lawyers who was in charge, they were unable to answer. When reporters asked Trump’s press secretary the same question Tuesday, she said, “I’m not going to reveal the name of that individual from this podium.” At the same time that Musk is holding the government in his hands, the White House keeps insisting he’s not the DOGE administrator. Then, later the same day, out of nowhere, the administration told reporters that DOGE’s administrator is, in fact, a former health care executive named Amy Gleason. That apparently came as news to Gleason, who “was scheduled to be on vacation in Mexico on Tuesday and told associates that she was not aware ahead of time that the White House planned to make public her role,” people familiar with the situation told The New York Times.But we know who the real administrator of DOGE seems to be: Musk, the guy who coined the name of the initiative on the social media site he owns, who is in the White House all the time, who spoke before any Cabinet member at Wednesday’s meeting, who has no formal legal or constitutional authority, who is seemingly deciding unilaterally who gets fired and who gets hired, what gets cut, who gets paid and how many children in Sudan are going to starve. Musk is in charge. You know it and I know it. But the administration appears to be obfuscating this in the courts and in the media. They’re hemming, hawing and stammering, attempting to be a moving target to avoid accountability for what they’re doing to our government, because they know this is an unconstitutional seizure of power that is an insult to our democratic system.
Chris Hayes hosts “All In with Chris Hayes” at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday through Friday on MS NOW. He is the editor-at-large at The Nation. A former fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Hayes was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book is “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource” (Penguin Press).
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW.
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