Marco Rubio sat next to Trump in the Cabinet Room of the White House and listened to a verbal attack from President Musk, the richest man in the world, about how he had failed to slash his staff at the State Department.
You have fired “nobody,” Musk told Lil Marco, with apparently the exception of a DOGE employee.
Lil Marco had been privately seething at the DOGE takeover and shuttering of USAID, an agency supposedly under Rubio’s control, when he confronted Musk and laid out his grievances.
Musk was not being truthful, Lil Marco said. What about the more than 1,500 State Department officials who took early retirement in buyouts? Didn’t they count as layoffs? He asked, sarcastically, whether Musk wanted him to rehire all those people just so he could make a show of firing them again.
Rubio then laid out his plans to reorganize the DOS, but Musk told him that he “was good on tv,” implying he was not good for much else.
Trump sat back in his chair with his arms folded and allowed the two to joust for an uncomfortable time before intervening. He defended Lil Marco saying he was doing a great job.
Rubio has a lot to deal with, Trump said. He is very busy, he is always traveling and on TV, and he has an agency to run. So everyone just needs to work together.
And before the dust-up with Rubio, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy got in his digs at Musk.
Musk and Duffy went back and forth about the Federal Aviation Administration’s equipment for tracking airplanes and what kind of fix was needed.
Duffy complained that the team DOGE bros were busy laying 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 him that was a lie. Give me their names. Tell me their names. Duffy said there were no names because he had stopped the bros from firing them. Musk told Duffy there were DEI hires working the control towers.
The argument ended with Trump telling Duffy that he had to hire people from M.I.T. as air traffic controllers. These air traffic controllers need to be “geniuses,” he said.
Doug Collins, secretary of veterans affairs, said the DOGE cuts will affect thousands of veterans in one of the most political challenges of cutting the federal hires.
Collins argued they needed to be strategic about it.
Trump agreed with Collins, and said they ought to retain the smart ones and get rid of the bad ones.
In the end, Trump praised all parties in the meeting, but declared that from now on, the secretaries would be in charge; the Musk team would only advise.
Trump posted to social media that next phase of his plan to cut the federal work force would be conducted with a “scalpel” rather than a “hatchet” (or chainsaw?).
And for the record, Musk wore a suit and tie to Thursday’s meeting instead of his usual T-shirt after Trump ribbed him about his sloppy appearance.
The New York Times published this story, based on interviews from five people with knowledge of the meeting.
BBC and The Independent also carried the story.
Ari Melber covered it for MSNBC as well:
