Government expert on Elon Musk and DOGE’s “slash-and-burn exercise”

It was a remarkable moment last Tuesday: President Trump standing beside a shiny electric car at the White House making a pitch for the car’s maker, Elon Musk: “This man has devoted his energy and his life to doing this. I think he’s been treated very unfairly by a very small group of people.”

For Musk – who spent about $300 million to help Trump win the White House, and who has reportedly pledged millions more to Trump’s political efforts – it was a boost for Tesla’s image, and a show of solidarity from the president. As he climbed into the driver’s seat, Mr. Trump gushed, “Everything’s computers!”

Tesla protests across the country have been a response to the “Department of Government Efficiency” initiative, known as DOGE. And as the man at its helm, Musk has been presidential confidant, cost-cutter, and government contractor all at once.

When asked about possible conflicts of interest given Musk’s role in the Trump administration, Katie Drummond, the global editorial director of Wired (the technology publication that has scored recent scoops about Musk and his associates), says, “It is very clear that there are conflicts of interest across the board. I mean, Elon Musk himself is one giant conflict of interest.

“When you think about SpaceX, Starlink, Tesla, you think about all of these companies that are in some way, shape or form regulated and overseen by different agencies of the federal government,” Drummond said. “And then you remember that the person who owns and runs all of these companies is flying on Air Force One with President Trump. Of course it’s a conflict of interest.”

After years of covering Silicon Valley, Wired was ready to cover the ascent of tech billionaires into politics. [Last year, the magazine endorsed Trump’s opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.]

But in January, present at Trump’s inauguration were Musk and other Silicon Valley billionaires.

Asked if that represented a new power structure in this country, Drummond said, “It’s a power structure that has been growing for a while now. But I thought that the inauguration was such a stark moment of realization – I think should be a moment of realization for everyone in the United States – about who really runs this country.”

And who is running it? Elon Musk? Or President Trump?

“The technology industry,” Drummond replied. “You think about the trillions of dollars involved in all of those companies and those businesses. There is so much power in the technology industry, and when you combine that with, you know, essentially collusion with the federal administration, or at least a willingness to work hand-in-hand with the Trump administration, that’s what we’re about to see.”

Newt Gingrich is a Republican former Speaker of the House, and a long-time Trump ally. Asked if he is concerned about possible conflicts of interest given the world’s richest man’s many business dealings with the federal government, Gingrich said, “Well, I think you always have to look at the danger of conflicts of interest with anybody. But at the same time, I would say that one of the virtues of being as wealthy as he is, is he hardly needs to rig the game.”

Asked who has oversight over Musk at this point, Gingrich replied, “Donald J. Trump. He is the chief executive officer of the United States. He was elected by the American people, and he’s acting as the President of the United States.”

Gingrich became a household name three decades ago for his own push to shrink the federal government. Asked how today is different, Gingrich opined that the government is “much sicker” now than it was in 1995. “It’s had a huge growth of bureaucracy, a huge growth of left-wing ideology, much bigger deficits,” he said. “Trump has been campaigning for 10 years. He’s found in Elon Musk the kind of person who has the drive, the toughness, the intelligence to really fundamentally take on the ‘deep state’ and change it in ways that would normally be unthinkable.”

In the 1990s, Gingrich pressured the Democratic administration of President Bill Clinton to embrace conservative budget cuts. But in the Clinton-era, most reforms came only after months of deliberation and Congressional action – in stark contrast to what’s happening today.

“Let’s be clear: Some people are gonna get hurt, let’s be honest,” Gingrich said of DOGE’s broad cuts to federal programs and staff in virtually every agency. “There’ll be some people laid off that probably shouldn’t have been. There’ll be some contracts that are dropped that probably shouldn’t have been.”

“Or some things that happen where the government just isn’t functioning well,” I said.

“Then the question you have to ask yourself is, on balance, does this system need to be fixed, even if the risk of fixing is gonna be some things that aren’t totally a hundred percent?” Gingrich said. “Because you slow down enough to try to avoid any possible mistake, you’ll get nothing done.”

But Elaine Kamarck, a scholar at Washington’s Brookings Institution, countered, “You can’t just start lopping off whole categories of workers.”

And what is the outcome if the table of government is tipped over? “People will die,” Kamarck said. “It’s that serious.”

In the 1990s, Karmack was effectively the Clinton administration’s counterpart to Gingrich, administering what was called Rego: Reinventing Government. She said it was very different from what is being implemented by DOGE and the White House. “What Musk is doing, and Trump, is they’re testing the limits of executive power in a way that we did not,” she said. “We went through it the old-fashioned way: If we thought a law needed to be changed, we went to Congress and asked them to change it.”

Asked whether Democrats should work with Musk and President Trump, as Democrats tried with Republicans in the ’90s, Karmack said, “I think Democrats should try where they can, absolutely. I think they should try to work with Musk. The problem is there’s a total lack of transparency. We don’t know who they’re cutting. There’s no rationale for why they’re cutting. They’re saying these people are wasteful? What do you mean? What are they doing that is a waste of taxpayers’ money? We’ve gotten none of this.

“This is just a sort of slash-and-burn exercise,” Karmack said. “This is not a thought-out exercise.”

In a statement to “CBS Sunday Morning,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that DOGE has been “incredibly transparent,” and that “President Trump has stated he will not allow conflicts, and Elon himself has committed to recusing himself from potential conflicts.”

But Katie Drummond of Wired says concerns about Musk are not going away … and Elon Musk, for now, remains empowered.

“It’s very clear, and I think should be very clear to anyone who has watched Elon Musk and how he operates for any period of time, his work ethic and his ambitions are limitless,” said Drummond. “I think we are really sort of only at the beginning of what has the potential to be a much more seismic transformation of these federal agencies, of the federal infrastructure, for as long as Elon Musk is involved in this transformation.”

       
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Story produced by Ed Forgotson. Editor: Remington Korper. 

Robert Costa

Robert Costa is a national correspondent for “CBS News Sunday Morning” and chief Washington analyst for CBS News.