Musk Spars With Trump Cabinet Officials In Tense Meeting: Report

Donald Trump is — at least publicly — attempting to reign in Elon Musk and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) amid growing pushback from the public, Congress, and members of the president’s Cabinet. 

On Thursday, Trump reportedly told his Cabinet members during a White House meeting that they would be in charge of the hiring and firing decisions within their agencies. The decision is a stark departure from how the administration has operated its first two months in office, giving Musk virtually unchecked authority to cut large swaths of federal departments and agencies.

“Keep all the people you want, everybody that you need,” Trump reportedly told his secretaries in the closed-door meeting on Thursday, adding in a Truth Social post that his administration would be using a “scalpel” — as opposed to the chainsaw Musk wielded at CPAC last month — to make cuts to the federal bureaucracy. 

“DOGE has been an incredible success, and 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 wrote, adding that he would be meeting with Musk and his cabinet every two weeks.

The president returning basic authorities to his Cabinet secretaries comes amid growing tension between the top brass of the Trump administration, and the erratic, entitled billionaire.

According to a Friday report from The New York Times, Thursday’s Cabinet meeting was a volatile mess of grievance litigation between Musk and the president’s top appointees. After weeks of Musk acting as virtual co-president to Trump, tensions finally boiled over. 

Musk reportedly spent a significant amount of time at this week’s meeting berating Secretary of State Marco Rubio in front of the president, claiming that “nobody” had been fired from his agency. 

A furious Rubio reportedly countered with a sarcastic ask to Musk if the 1,500 USAID employees who’d taken DOGE’s buyouts didn’t count as layoffs, asking the billionaire if he’d like them to be rehired so he could publicly fire them again. The argument carried on for some time before Trump finally intervened on Rubio’s behalf, saying that he was doing a “great job” and had a lot on his plate.

Musk was by no means done. The SpaceX owner — fresh off back to back failed test launches of his Starship rockets — also sparred with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. Musk has placed a target on the Federal Aviation Administration, the regulatory body that — aside from ensuring planes don’t crash into each other — oversees large swaths of space travel logistics. 

According to the Times, Duffy told the cCabinet that DOGE staffers were attempting to lay off air traffic controllers at a time when the department was struggling with the fallout of several crashes. Musk accused Duffy of lying and demanded names of fired workers, to which Duffy replied that there were none because he had intervened to protect their jobs. 

Musk accused the FAA of hiring unqualified control tower operators through diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, but avoided providing details on what he meant when Duffy pressed him, instead offering him his phone number. The president eventually interjected, telling Duffy that he should be hiring people from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as air traffic controllers because they needed to be “geniuses.”

Trump was asked about the meeting on Friday. “No clash, I was there,” he replied to a reporter’s question about the incident. “You’re just a troublemaker. Elon gets along great with Marco and they’re both doing a fantastic job.”

Musk has been pissing off top-level Trump officials for some time now.

“He is already as annoying as Vivek but has about a million times more weight to throw around,” one well-connected Republican and Trump ally told Rolling Stone of Musk, referencing Vivek Ramaswamy, the former Republican presidential candidate turned Trumpist shill who was set to co-lead DOGE alongside Musk before he was reportedly forced out of the role. The source added that they’ve talked to multiple Cabinet-level officials and others in senior positions in the Trump administration in recent weeks about their mounting exasperations towards Musk and DOGE’s shambolic approach.

It’s not just Cabinet secretaries who are growing sick of cleaning up after Musk’s antics. This week, the billionaire launched a face-to-face congeniality tour with members of Congress annoyed at DOGE’s repeated usurping of congressional authority, and lack of communication with lawmakers. Republican lawmakers have been confronted by constituents livid over Musk’s actions, to the point that the Republican National Campaign Committee is now advising GOP elected officials to stop hosting town halls. According to The Washington Post, instead of offering to be more cautious about what he cut from federal programs, Musk suggested the creation of a hotline Republicans could call to get decisions they didn’t like reversed. 

On Friday, House Speaker Mike Johnson told Fox News that Musk has “completely pure motives,” and argued that there is “no playbook for what he’s doing.” 

“He acknowledged, there are gonna be some mishaps and mistakes along the way. But we will do course correction immediately,” the speaker said.

It’s unclear how much Musk’s role as America’s de facto co-president will actual change. Two sources close to Trump predict that the president’s clarification that his appointed and confirmed Cabinet is responsible for hiring and firing will have more of an impact on potential legal “ass-covering,” as one of the people calls it, than anything having to do with Musk’s Trump-approved rampage throughout the federal bureaucracy.

One Trump administration official previously told Rolling Stone that they were reviewing and compiling recent poll data that suggested Musk and DOGE were becoming a liability for Trump in the hopes of convincing the president to put Musk in his place. This official had yet to make that case to Trump, mostly out of fear that doing so would backfire and word of it would quickly leak to famously petty Musk.