Elon Musk grabbed center stage at the first cabinet meeting of President Trump’s second term — despite not heading an actual Cabinet department — saying “America will go bankrupt” without his budget-slashing efforts.
Wearing a black MAGA cap and “Tech Support” T-shirt, the billionaire first buddy told the president and assembled agency leaders that he would continue implementing deep cuts across the federal government.
“We cannot sustain as a country $2 trillion deficits,” Musk said. “If this continues, the country will become de facto bankrupt. I It’s not an optional thing. It’s essential.”
Musk defended his controversial mass “what did you do last week?” email to millions of federal employees, calling it a “pulse check” to see if they were doing anything useful.
The Tesla and SpaceX mogul said he now hopes to cut $1 trillion in government spending, a figure that represents a significant backtracking from the $2 trillion in cuts he vowed to make while campaigning for Trump’s election in the fall.
Trump heaped praise on Musk and backed his effort to root out what they call fraud and waste, and suggested employees who don’t respond could be fired soon.
“They’re on the bubble,” Trump said.
The president dismissed press reports that some of the cabinet officials were unhappy with Musk, who brought a chainsaw to a conservative conference to underline his budget-cutting zeal.
“Is anybody unhappy with Elon?” Trump asked the other cabinet. “If you are, we’ll throw (you) out of here.”
Musk took a star turn at the cabinet meeting even though the White House has been cagey about his actual official position and the Department of Government Efficiency that he spearheads isn’t even a government agency.
Most of the actual cabinet officials didn’t say a word at the meeting, which was dominated by Musk and Trump’s freewheeling remarks on a wide variety of topics.
Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick spoke glowingly of their new plan to charge $5 million to anyone who can pay for what they call a “gold card” visa to live and work in the U.S.
It’s basically a more expensive version of an existing program that grants permanent residency in exchange for investments, but which some lawmakers say has been abused.
The White House separately issued an edict to all federal agencies to cut thousands more staff by mid-March.
Thousands of jobs have already been cut through a combination of buyout offers and moves to slash whole agencies like USAID.
Unions representing federal workers have challenged the Musk cuts in court with significant success, but Trump and Musk vow not to back down.
Democrats say the White House is inflicting unnecessary pain on the American people and will pay a heavy price at the ballot box.
Trump also announced that Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy would come to the White House Friday to sign an agreement granting the U.S. significant access to its valuable mineral wealth, including rare earth minerals.
He rebuffed a question about whether the deal would include security guarantees for the embattled nation which has spent the past three years fighting off a Russian invasion.
“I’m not going to make security guarantees, beyond very much,” Trump said.
Zelenskyy, meanwhile, says he plans to negotiate on security with Trump at the meeting and warned that any peace deal would have to include protection from future Russian attacks.
“if we don’t get security guarantees, we won’t have a ceasefire, nothing will work, nothing,” the Ukrainian leader said.
