Musk is more Uranus than Mars when it comes to reformative mass.
The New York Times has a piece today about a furious verbal scrum that’s alleged to have taken place between Elon Musk and Marco Rubio with Trump looking on. Musk reportedly excoriated Rubio for slow-walking cuts to the State Department, and Rubio erupted about what he views as Musk’s overenthusiastic smelting of federal machinery.
Marco Rubio was incensed. Here he was in the Cabinet Room of the White House, the secretary of state, seated beside the president and listening to a litany of attacks from the richest man in the world.
Seated diagonally opposite, across the elliptical mahogany table, Elon Musk was letting Mr. Rubio have it, accusing him of failing to slash his staff.
You have fired “nobody,” Mr. Musk told Mr. Rubio, then scornfully added that perhaps the only person he had fired was a staff member from Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
Mr. Rubio had been privately furious with Mr. Musk for weeks, ever since his team effectively shuttered an entire agency that was supposedly under Mr. Rubio’s control: the United States Agency for International Development. But, in the extraordinary cabinet meeting on Thursday in front of President Trump and around 20 others — details of which have not been reported before — Mr. Rubio got his grievances off his chest.
Between his electric personality and political donations, Elon Musk is a gravitational force in the Trump administration. When it comes to mass, he’s closer to Uranus than Mars — you can check my subjective figures with F=(G(m1 x m2)/r squared)) if you’re in the mood for a Saturday morning Newtonian formulation.
But the man is, as of now, a greater boon for reform rather than he is a hindrance. He’s an outlier who forces political creatures in the swamp to reckon with him — essentially, proof positive for observer theory; he discomfits the bureaucratically inclined.
This is not to say that Trump ought to greenlight everything Musk wishes because Musk’s vivisections can be excessive and counterproductive — a point our Jeff Blehar makes repeatedly and well. If cabinet members are occupied chasing Elon & Co. from ripping the wiring out of the walls to sell for scrap copper rates in an effort to save the government $100,000 in electricity costs, then they can’t concentrate on more comprehensive efforts to purge progressivism from their departments.
The graph below depicts how I see the meeting’s layout. Musk and Commerce’s Howard Lutnick want big, juicy cuts. Sean Duffy and Rubio are incrementalists — conservative operators. The Times‘s Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan are cheerleading the implosion, out on the left flank. These parties should fight. Trump should have divided counsel. Ideological federalism in the federal government prevents Musk from selling the Smithsonian for Dogecoin, and further prevents Rubio from being absorbed into the couch cushions of the State Department. The Times provides a Toby Flenderson toward whom they can direct their irritation with the other.
Maybe more than anything, I’m glad to have a White House open enough for us to have a look in and debate its current fixation — a far cry from the faceless decrees that emanated from the Once-ler Retirement Home of the Biden administration.
Governance should be ugly and transparent; its currency is power granted by the citizenry, and we should be able to observe and audit every transaction thereof.