Cabinet secretaries, not Musk should take lead on agency cuts saus Trump

The president told cabinet secretaries to ‘use a scalpel not a hatchet,’ but said Elon Musk would step in if they didn’t make sufficient cuts.

Donald Trump says Elon Musk will step in if cabinet secretaries don’t make sufficient cuts. Picture: AFP.

President Trump told his cabinet secretaries they should take the lead over billionaire Elon Musk in making personnel decisions related to their departments.

“If they can cut, it’s better,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday following a closed-door cabinet meeting at the White House. “And if they don’t cut, then Elon will do the cutting.”

Cabinet secretaries should “go first, keep all the people you want, everybody that you need,” Trump said. But he added that Musk would keep an eye on their decisions and would step in if needed.

Musk, who oversees the Department of Government Efficiency, has spent the first weeks of Trump’s second term slashing federal programs and pushing for a far-reaching reduction in the size of the government workforce.

His moves have, at times, caught some senior agency officials off guard. Officials at several agencies instructed staff to pause or not respond to a February Musk-directed email asking federal workers to provide a list of five things they did the previous week.

The president, in the Thursday Oval Office meeting with reporters, said deep cuts at federal agencies were necessary because the government was experiencing “bloat like nobody’s ever seen before.”

“I also want to keep the good people,” he said, “We want to get rid of the people that aren’t working, that aren’t showing up and have a lot of problems.”

Senate Republicans have been pushing for Trump to empower cabinet secretaries to make the decisions about how to run their agencies and further cut costs.

“They’re going to be, I think, probably better attuned,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said on CNN earlier this week.

Trump posted on social media Thursday afternoon that the cabinet secretaries could be “very precise” in making cuts and would be working with Musk. He also said he would be convening the cabinet and Musk every two weeks “until that aspect of this very necessary job is done.”

“We say the ‘scalpel’ rather than the ‘hatchet,’” Trump posted.

Musk is advising Trump as a “special government employee,” a status under federal ethics laws that permits private-sector employees to work inside the government without having to relinquish their outside salaries or investments. Unlike cabinet secretaries, his position, which has given him sweeping power over the federal government, wasn’t Senate-confirmed.

During Trump’s first cabinet meeting, the president defended the billionaire. “Some disagree a little bit, but I will tell you, for the most part, I think everyone’s not only happy, they’re thrilled,” Trump said. Addressing his cabinet, he later asked: “Is anyone unhappy with Elon?”

He also acknowledged in the same meeting that some in the cabinet “disagree a little bit” with Musk, who started making cuts to departments even before some secretaries were confirmed by the Senate.

In some cases, the administration has had to reverse some of the Musk-driven firings, including the firing of employees who work on the country’s nuclear weapons.

Asked about the reversal, Trump said during a press conference at Mar-a-Lago last month that he wasn’t concerned.

“I think we have to just do what we have to do,” he said.

Dow Jones