WASHINGTON — WASHINGTON (AP) — Elon Musk took a star turn at the first Cabinet meeting of President Donald Trump’s new term, holding forth in a black “Make America Great Again” campaign hat on Wednesday about his role as “humble tech support” for the federal government — and laying out dire stakes if his cost-cutting efforts fail.
“If we don’t do this, America will go bankrupt,” Musk told department heads assembled around a large wooden table in the Cabinet Room.
Trump, not one to easily share the spotlight, seemed happy to turn the top of the hour-plus meeting over to Musk for a “little summary” of what the Department of Government Efficiency has been up to, saying that Musk’s team had found evidence of “horrible things” afoot in the government.
“He’s sacrificing a lot,” Trump said of Musk, referencing the time the world’s richest man is taking away from his many business ventures. “He’s also getting hit.”
Musk, for his part, said his lightning-fast efforts to right-size the government had drawn death threats and he jokingly knocked his fist on his “wooden head” as he said he hoped to find $1 trillion to trim from the federal budget, an effort that has caused extensive disruption among federal workers and those who rely on their services.
Musk defended his weekend attempt to require government workers to justify their prior week’s work under penalty of termination — a move that drew pushback from many in the room on national security and privacy grounds — as merely a “pulse check” to ensure that those working for the government have “a pulse and two neurons,” adding that “this is not a high bar” for workers to meet.
Speculating that some workers are either dead or fictional, Musk added that the goal was to see that workers are real, alive and can “write an email.”
Asked if members of the Cabinet were happy with Musk, the DOGE guru started to answer the question. But Trump interjected and said he might want to let Cabinet members answer. Then Trump joked that if anyone disagreed, he might “throw them out.”
That drew applause from Cabinet members.
Trump then turned things back to Musk, who said the president had “put together, I think, the best Cabinet ever.”
“And I don’t give false praise,” he added.
Musk did volunteer that his efforts to slash government spending would “make mistakes.”
He cited as an example that, while hustling to dramatically shrink the U.S. Agency for International Development, “One of the things we accidentally canceled very briefly was Ebola prevention.” Musk insisted that “there was no interruption” in services before the funding was restored.
But a USAID official said Wednesday that no funds for the agency’s Ebola response had been released under President Donald Trump’s Jan. 20 funding freeze for foreign aid, including for efforts to combat the spread of the deadly virus.
After about 15 minutes of focus on Musk and DOGE, Trump shifted the spotlight of the Cabinet meeting back to his own accomplishments in his first weeks in office.
The Cabinet sat mostly silently for more than an hour, as Trump opened the floor to questions from an invited group of reporters.
Asked if he expected his Cabinet to follow his directives without exception, Trump initially scoffed at the question before answering, “of course, no exceptions.”
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AP Writer Ellen Knickmeyer contributed to this report.