Inside the explosive meeting where Trump officials clashed with Elon Musk

Washington: 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 Rubio have it, accusing him of failing to slash his staff.

From left: US Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and President Donald Trump during a cabinet meeting at the White House.Credit: Bloomberg

You have fired “nobody”, Musk told Rubio, then scornfully added that perhaps the only person he had fired was a staff member from Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

Rubio had been privately furious with Musk for weeks, ever since his team effectively shuttered an entire agency that was supposedly under Rubio’s control: the US Agency for International Development. But, in the extraordinary cabinet meeting in front of President Donald Trump and about 20 others – details of which have not been reported before – Rubio got his grievances off his chest.

Musk was not being truthful, Rubio said. What about the more than 1500 State Department officials who took early retirement in buyouts? Didn’t they count as lay-offs? He asked, sarcastically, whether Musk wanted him to rehire all those people just so he could make a show of firing them again. Then he laid out his detailed plans for reorganising the department.

US President Donald Trump (centre right) during a cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington. At a new meeting on Thursday, Elon Musk clashed with a number of cabinet secretaries, including Marco Rubio.Credit: Bloomberg

Musk was unimpressed. He told Rubio he was “good on TV”, with the clear subtext being that he was not good for much else. Throughout all of this, the president sat back in his chair, arms folded, as if he were watching a tennis match.

After the argument dragged on for an uncomfortable time, Trump finally intervened to defend Rubio as doing a “great job”. Rubio has a lot to deal with, the president said. He is very busy, he is always travelling and on TV, and he has an agency to run. So everyone just needs to work together.

Cabinet officials clash with Musk

The meeting was a potential turning point after the frenetic first weeks of Trump’s second term. It yielded the first significant indication that Trump is willing to put some limits on Musk, whose efforts have become the subject of several lawsuits and prompted concerns from Republican lawmakers, some of whom have complained directly to the president.

Elon Musk displays his T-shirt reading “Tech Support” during the first cabinet meeting of Trump’s second presidency. This time he dressed up.Credit: Doug Mills/The New York Times

Cabinet officials almost uniformly like the concept of what Musk set out to do – reducing waste, fraud and abuse in government – but have been frustrated by the chainsaw approach to upending the government and the lack of consistent co-ordination.

Thursday’s meeting, which was abruptly scheduled the evening before, was a sign that Trump is mindful of the growing complaints. He tried to offer each side something by praising both Musk and his cabinet secretaries. (At least one, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who has had tense encounters related to Musk’s team, was not present.) The president made clear he still supported the mission of the Musk initiative. But now was the time, he said, to be a bit more refined in its approach.

From now on, Trump said, the secretaries would be in charge; the Musk team would only advise.

It is unclear what the long-term impact of the meeting will be. Musk remains Trump’s biggest political financial supporter – just this week his super political action (PAC) committee aired $US1 million ($1.5 million) worth of ads that said, “Thank you, President Trump” – and Musk’s control of social media website X has made administration staff members and cabinet secretaries alike fearful that he will target them in public.

A ‘scalpel’ not a ‘hatchet’

But if nothing else, the session laid bare the tensions within Trump’s team, and news of the sharp clashes spread quickly through senior ranks of cabinet agencies after it was over. This account is based on interviews with five people with knowledge of the events.

In a post on social media after the meeting, Trump said the next phase of his plan to cut the federal workforce would be conducted with a “scalpel” rather than a “hatchet” – a clear reference to Musk’s scorched-earth approach.

Musk, who wore a suit and tie to the meeting instead of his usual T-shirt after Trump publicly ribbed him about his sloppy appearance, defended himself by saying he had three companies with a market cap of tens of billions of dollars, and that his results spoke for themselves.

But he was soon clashing with members of the cabinet.

Just moments before the blow-up with Rubio, Musk and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy went back and forth about the state of the Federal Aviation Administration’s equipment for tracking aircraft and what kind of fix was needed. Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, jumped in to support Musk.

Duffy said the young staff of Musk’s team were trying to lay off air-traffic controllers. What am I supposed to do? Duffy said. I have multiple plane crashes to deal with now, and your people want me to fire air traffic controllers?

Musk told Duffy that his assertion was a “lie”. Duffy insisted it was not; he had heard it from them directly. Musk, asking who had been fired, said: give me their names. Tell me their names.

Duffy said there were not any names because he had stopped them from being fired. At another point, Musk insisted that people hired under diversity, equity and inclusion programs were working in control towers. Duffy pushed back and Musk did not add details, but said during the longer back and forth that Duffy had his phone number and should call him if he had any issues to raise.

The exchange ended with Trump telling Duffy that he had to hire people from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as air traffic controllers. These air traffic controllers need to be “geniuses”, he said.

Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins has been dealing with one of the most politically sensitive challenges of all the cabinet secretaries. Musk’s cuts will affect thousands of veterans – a powerful constituency and a core part of the Trump base. Collins made the point that they should not wield a blunt instrument and cleave off everyone from the VA. They needed to be strategic about it. Trump agreed with Collins, saying they ought to retain the smart ones and get rid of the bad ones.

In response to a request for comment from The New York Times, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in a statement: “As President Trump said, this was a great and productive meeting amongst members of his team to discuss cost-cutting measures and staffing across the federal government. Everyone is working as one team to help President Trump deliver on his promise to make our government more efficient.”

Tammy Bruce, a spokesperson for the State Department, responded, “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.”

A Department of Veterans Affairs spokesperson said, “As President Trump has said, it’s important to increase efficiency and reduce bureaucracy while keeping in place the best and most productive federal employees. VA is working with DOGE and the rest of the administration to do just that.”

Emergency units at the wreckage of a plane crash in Arlington, Virginia, near the Pentagon, in January.Credit: Getty Images

A Transportation Department official would not comment.

Musk, who later claimed on X that the cabinet meeting was “very productive”, seemed far less enthused inside the room. He aggressively defended himself, reminding the secretaries that he had built multiple billion-dollar companies from the ground up and knew something about hiring good people.

Most cabinet members did not join the fray. Musk’s anger directed at Rubio in particular seemed to catch people in the room by surprise, one person with knowledge of the meeting said. Another person said Musk’s caustic responses to Duffy and Rubio seemed to deter other members, many of whom have privately complained about the Musk team, from speaking.

But it remains to be seen how long this new arrangement will last.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.