The Department of Government Efficiency lives. But Donald Trump is reining in Elon Musk.
President Donald Trump’s shift on the Department of Government Efficiency began with a warning from an unlikely source.
Jesse Watters, a co-host of the Fox News hit show The Five, is usually a slick deliverer of MAGA talking points. But on February 19, Watters told a surprisingly emotional story about a friend working at the Pentagon who was poised to lose his job as part of the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts to the federal workforce. “I finally found one person I knew who got DOGE’d, and it hit me in the heart,” said Watters, who urged his Fox colleagues to “be a little bit less callous.”
Although Watters soon resumed championing DOGE, the moment went viral. Trump watched the clip and asked advisers if it was resonating with his base of supporters, according to one of three White House officials I spoke with for this story (they requested anonymity so they could discuss private conversations).
Over the ensuing weeks, the president grew unhappy with the television coverage of cuts affecting his voters, according to two of those officials, while the White House fielded calls from Cabinet members and Republican lawmakers frustrated by Elon Musk, the billionaire tech mogul empowered to slash the federal government. Some of Trump’s top advisers became worried about the political fallout from DOGE’s sweeping cuts, especially after seeing scenes of angry constituents yelling at GOP members of Congress in town halls.
[Read: Hungary joins the DOGE efforts]
All of this culminated in Trump taking his first steps to rein in Musk’s powers yesterday. The president called a closed-door meeting with Cabinet members and Musk, one that devolved into sharp exchanges between the DOGE head and several agency leaders. Afterward, Trump declared that his Cabinet would now “go first” in deciding whom in their departments to keep or fire.
DOGE lives. Trump has made clear that Musk still wields significant authority. And those close to Trump say that the president is still enamored with the idea of employing the world’s richest man, and still largely approves of the work that DOGE is doing to gut the federal bureaucracy. Some in the White House also believe that clarifying Musk’s purview might help the administration in a series of lawsuits alleging that Musk is illegally empowered.
But Trump’s first public effort to put a leash on Musk appears to mark the end of DOGE’s opening chapter, and a potential early turning point in Trump’s new administration.
Many in the GOP have reveled in the brash way that Musk and his young team of engineers have strode into government agencies, seized the computers, and slashed jobs and budgets. And few Republicans have been willing to publicly challenge Musk, who has taken on hero status with many on the right and wields an unfathomable fortune with which he can punish his political foes. But important figures within the president’s orbit—including some senior staffers and outside advisers—now quietly hope that the cuts, as Trump himself posted on social media yesterday, will be done with a “‘scalpel’ rather than the ‘hatchet.’”
“I don’t want to see a big cut where a lot of good people are cut,” Trump said to reporters in the Oval Office after yesterday’s meeting. But, he added, “Elon and the group are going to be watching them, and if they can cut, it’s better. And if they don’t cut, then Elon will do the cutting.”
Six weeks into Trump’s term, the White House has declined to say how many people have left the federal government so far, or how many more it wants to see fired as it looks to reshape the government’s civil service of 2.3 million workers. Democrats, shaking off their despondency after November’s elections, have rallied against Musk, trying to save agencies such as USAID and warning that all Americans, no matter their political party, would feel the impact of DOGE cuts to agencies such as the Federal Aviation Administration, the IRS, and the Department of Agriculture. Musk paid them no heed, trashing Democrats’ objections to his more than 219 million followers on X and wielding an actual chain saw onstage at a conservative conference last month. Days later, he directed that an email be sent to the entire federal workforce asking workers to justify their employment by listing their accomplishments of the past week.
That was the breaking point for several Cabinet members. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and FBI Director Kash Patel were among the officials who voiced complaints to their staff and to the White House that Musk was usurping their authority, one of the White House officials told me. Their agencies, along with many others, instructed employees not to reply to Musk’s email, and the government’s main personnel agency later said that responding was voluntary, neutering DOGE’s threats. Trump’s Cabinet officials broadly agree with DOGE’s mission—to reduce waste, fraud, and abuse in government—but object to the seemingly haphazard way it is being executed.
[Juliette Kayyem: Is DOGE sure it wants to fire these people?]
That pushback from inside the administration was combined with rising public anger about the cuts that exploded at several lawmakers’ town halls in recent weeks. From Georgia to Kansas, Republicans took sharp criticism about the cuts, including from some in the crowds who described themselves as Trump voters and veterans. The National Republican Congressional Committee told lawmakers this week to postpone holding any further town halls. The anger reverberated to Capitol Hill this week, with several Republicans privately urging DOGE to slow down.
Majority Leader John Thune said on CNN on Tuesday that Cabinet secretaries should retain the full power to hire and fire, a belief he later reiterated privately to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, according to one of the White House officials who was briefed on the call. This person told me that in recent weeks, Wiles has also relayed to Trump other GOP lawmakers’ concerns about Musk, including that the constant drip of stories about DOGE slashing key jobs is distracting from their political messaging on issues such as immigration and taxes.
Musk was invited to a Senate lunch on Wednesday, a meal that took place just hours after the Supreme Court delivered a significant blow to the Trump administration in one of several ongoing legal fights over spending cuts. In the meeting, lawmakers later told reporters, several senators urged Musk to better coordinate with Congress by giving them more visibility into his process. They also offered to make the cuts permanent by enshrining them in legislation.
Senator Lindsey Graham told reporters afterward that the “the system needs to be fine-tuned to coordinate between DOGE and Congress and the administration,” and that Musk needs to be better about addressing senators’ concerns. Musk, in the lunch, distanced himself from some of the more unpopular firings. Hours later, he had a similar meeting with House Republicans, some of whom voiced unhappiness with that day’s news reports about plans to fire 80,000 Veterans Affairs workers, thousands of whom are veterans themselves, in a move that would likely delay vital services to those who have served the country in uniform.
Trump also grew angry at those reports, snapping at aides that he did not want to be seen as someone who betrayed veterans, many of whom he believes voted for him, an outside adviser who spoke with the president told me. That, when combined with the complaints from his advisers and worries that Musk was beginning to drag down his own poll numbers, prompted him to call for the meeting with the DOGE leader and the Cabinet heads at the White House yesterday.
The meeting soon grew volatile, according to an official present, with Rubio snapping back at Musk when the billionaire accused him of not moving fast enough with his firings. Musk and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy also clashed over the quality of air-traffic controllers, while Doug Collins, who runs the Department of Veterans Affairs, urged that any layoffs be done more carefully. Trump agreed. Details of the meeting were first reported today by The New York Times. In addition to announcing that the Cabinet secretaries would be in charge of firings, Trump said that similar meetings would be held every two weeks.
“Everyone is working as one team to help President Trump deliver on his promise to make our government more efficient,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told me in a statement when I asked if Musk’s role is shrinking.
Tammy Bruce, a spokesperson for the State Department, said in a statement: “Secretary Rubio considered the meeting an open and productive discussion with a dynamic team that is united in achieving the same goal: making America great again.” The Departments of Defense and Transportation, the FBI, and the VA, as well as DOGE, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Musk later wrote on X that the meeting was “very productive.” Yet for some in MAGA’s populist wing, the moment was perceived as a humiliation for the billionaire. They rallied around efforts to protect the Pentagon and the authority of Hegseth, a popular figure on the right. A cartoon of Trump walking Musk like a dog on a leash was passed around on the Hill and in right-wing-media circles. Some predicted that Trump would soon jettison his billionaire completely.
[Read: The Trump voters who are losing patience]
The White House insists that Musk’s work will continue. The Office of Personnel Management outlined plans this week for a new wave of firings, offering guidance to cut entire teams and job categories. Most of those fired so far have been probationary employees, who are typically new hires with fewer job protections.
Democrats, who see Musk as a potent political target for their party, have downplayed the significance of Musk’s seeming demotion.
“I don’t think anything has fundamentally changed.” Representative Adam Smith, the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, told me. “It’s not about government efficiency and effectiveness. It’s about crippling the federal workforce because he sees it as a threat to him instead of a service provider to the country.”
In an effort to ward off other court challenges, the administration has also tried to stress that Musk, who is a special government employee, is not technically running the U.S. DOGE Service; instead, the White House said last month, DOGE is administered by Amy Gleason, a former health-care executive who worked for the agency in a previous iteration.
The claim was undermined, however, by Trump’s own words: When he spoke before Congress on Tuesday night, he repeatedly referred to Musk as the head of DOGE.
