Musk: Is Trump putting him on a leash?

The president “seems to be learning” that severe, indiscriminate cuts won’t make voters happy.

(Image credit: Pool / AP)

published 18 March 2025

Not everyone in Donald Trump’s orbit loves Elon Musk’s “chain-saw approach” to government, said Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman in The New York Times. In a Cabinet meeting last week, DOGE’s billionaire enforcer had angry clashes with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy. An “incensed” Rubio, still seething that Musk disbanded a State Department agency, USAID, without his input, objected to Musk’s claim that he wasn’t firing State Department employees fast enough, noting that 1,500 staffers had taken DOGE’s buyout offer. Musk shot back that Rubio was “good on TV”—but implicitly not at much else. Duffy accused Musk of trying to buy out air traffic controllers right after several plane crashes—a spat Trump, playing peacemaker, tried to resolve by demanding Duffy hire “geniuses” with MIT degrees to direct air traffic. Facing lawsuits and “rising public anger,” said Jonathan Lemire in The Atlantic, Trump announced afterward that Cabinet officials would “go first” in making cuts, and would use “a scalpel,” not “a hatchet.” Will Trump really “put a leash on Musk”?

The president “seems to be learning” that severe, indiscriminate cuts won’t make voters happy, said the Washington Examiner in an editorial, and that “firing random people” doesn’t make government more efficient. After the Cabinet spat, Trump said that it was “important to keep the best and most productive people.” He’s right. Bad publicity has reportedly triggered “a reckoning within DOGE,” said Elizabeth Dwoskin in The Washington Post, with Musk’s team urgently looking to “find and champion positive achievements.” Nearly half of Americans disapprove of his efforts, which they see as “callous and undisciplined.” With growing attention on “fired military veterans, hours-long waits to file retirement claims, and threatened benefits for 9/11 survivors,” DOGE faces a true “PR crisis.”

Still, it’s not likely Trump will limit Musk “in any meaningful way,” said Ed Kilgore in New York magazine. He still insists “Elon will do the cutting” if department heads won’t, and this week a submissive Rubio touted the cancellation of 83 percent of programs in USAID and thanked “DOGE and our hardworking staff” for making it happen. Even if Cabinet officials claim credit for staffing and funding cuts suggested by DOGE, the “effort to demolish the federal government” will continue. Musk and Trump have the same goal: “a radically reduced, decapitated, and demoralized public sector dominated by a gang of corrupt billionaires.”