The president has made it clear: Musk has gone too far, created too many unnecessary messes, and comported himself too clumsily.
I t’s impossible to know these days whether breaking news about the Trump administration is of any value — and not just because that news tends to be near-instantly rendered obsolete by the administration’s own changes of mind a day or two later. (Tariffs or no tariffs? Deport Ukrainians or not? Sit down. Stand up.) The other reason is that our news ecosystem is rapidly degrading, particularly online. This is a caveat that properly deserves to be expanded on in a piece I hope to write later — the feeling of drowning in a desert, being force-fed constant fake news with little true informational value in the Elon Era.
But given the impossibility of long-term planning during this administration, it seems important to forefront one bit of important news: After a month and a half of chaos, much of it done with great online fanfare but seemingly little substantive gain, Donald Trump has officially clamped the reins on Elon Musk and DOGE, and he’s pulling up hard. Politico reported yesterday — you see why I began with the caveat now, right? — that “President Donald Trump convened his Cabinet in person on Thursday to deliver a message: You’re in charge of your departments, not Elon Musk.”
The president’s message represents the first significant move to narrow Musk’s mandate. According to Trump’s new guidance, DOGE and its staff should play an advisory role — but Cabinet secretaries should make final decisions on personnel, policy and the pacing of implementation.
Musk joined the conversation and indicated he was on board with Trump’s directive. According to one person familiar with the meeting, Musk acknowledged that DOGE had made some missteps — a message he shared earlier this week with members of Congress.
As the wags sometimes say: “Big if true.” And given that it was said in a full cabinet meeting (and immediately leaked to the press), one imagines that this, for once, isn’t fake news — for now. After the meeting, Trump himself made the move official on Truth Social: “We say the ‘scalpel’ rather than the ‘hatchet’,” wrote Trump, a mere two weeks after Musk was ritually coronated with a chainsaw at CPAC and “GROAAARED” his way around stage for a minute like Leatherface searching for a helpless teenager.
Regardless of what Musk’s unflagging (and adorably credulous) worshippers will spin themselves into believing, the message is clear: As far as Trump is concerned, Musk has gone too far, created too many unnecessary messes, and comported himself too clumsily in both public and private to be allowed the kind of unfettered power he has heretofore reveled in. Yesterday marked his official neutering — in a meeting attended by every cabinet member, lest there be any doubt. It was a typically Trumpian move to bring a freshly restrained Elon along to apologize to the room (Politico: “According to one person familiar with the meeting, Musk acknowledged that DOGE had made some missteps”) and to recast his position, now properly understood, as merely advisory.
Good. Let’s not kid ourselves, folks: You have to stretch pretty hard to believe the original scope of Musk’s powers under DOGE was constitutional in the first place. (As Andy McCarthy wrote last week, DOGE has a laughably fake “administrator” — a career employee — to get around the reality that Musk is making legally unaccountable decisions such that his position ought to have required Senate confirmation.) That said, I freely confess my hypocrisy: I don’t mind seeing the federal government sliced and pared back — certainly because of its structurally progressive orientation, let alone any misspent money — and I was hoping Musk would use this sort of (again, borderline unconstitutional) power wisely.
As it turns out, miracles tend not to happen for a reason. The story isn’t over yet, of course; we will see whether Musk has done any real long-term good once things finally shake out (and perhaps if he reforms his own worst impulses). But I have seen for the most part only minuscule and often fake savings to justify such confidence to date. I instead see an egotist driven by his celebrity to knowingly adopt suboptimal methods in order to juice his own personal popularity. And while some of my readers may not have gotten tired of Musk’s antics, they are going to have to defer to their president, Donald Trump, who clearly has. The boom has been lowered.
Musk’s approach is governed by his two most obvious flaws: obsessive-compulsive tunnel vision and an unquenchable desire for public praise and attention. The combination of the two has, insofar as can be appreciated from a social media distance, made him liable to focus on flashy “viral” savings he can tout on his own platform or slip into Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress rather than on anything substantive. (It is a remarkable yet true observation that, with monetization on X, Elon has literally bought himself a paid online cheering section.) When he occasionally turns to the real magnitude of his task, he then zeroes in on crudely destructive, broad cuts in staff — cuts usually targeted, without any greater nuance, at government agencies already deemed suspect. Since the easiest staff to immediately lay off are new hires (older veterans have strong civil service protections), he’s simply laid almost all of them off first — with disastrous results, as these were precisely the people who actually did much of the work.
Old fans of The Wire will note that Musk’s approach would fit in eerily well if he were trying to earn promotion within the Baltimore Police Department: The politicians demand you meet artificial numbers, so policy becomes focused on “making the numbers” (even if that sometimes includes simply making up the numbers.) I want to see government not merely downsized but ideologically purged of its inherently progressive nature. But stupid, broad-brush cuts are no way to accomplish either of these tasks. Trump himself, at his cabinet meeting, was very clear on this specific point. “It’s very important that we cut levels down to where they should be, but it’s also important to keep the best and most productive people.” Sometimes the rolling chaos of serial updates from the Trump administration is hard to depend on — hey, just ask the markets these days! — but for once I believe the news is real: Elon Musk has been yanked back.