ALAN: Hi. This is Alan (ph) from Bristol, Wisconsin. I’m currently in the hospital waiting for my cochlear implant surgery to start after experiencing sudden hearing loss and becoming deaf in my left ear. This podcast was recorded at…
ASMA KHALID, HOST:
12:44 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday, February 13 of 2025.
ALAN: Things may have changed by the time you hear it, but soon, I’ll be able to hear it in both ears again. OK, here’s the show.
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KHALID: Oh, gosh. Well, I wish you a speedy recovery.
DANIELLE KURTZLEBEN, BYLINE: Yes, congratulations. Also, congratulations on your excellent Wisconsin accent. Here’s the show. It feels like upper Midwest home. I love it.
KHALID: Hey, there. It’s the NPR POLITICS PODCAST. I’m Asma Khalid. I cover the White House.
KURTZLEBEN: And I’m Danielle Kurtzleben. I also cover the White House.
KHALID: And today on the show, we’re looking at President Trump’s efforts to radically remake the federal government. It starts in many ways with DOGE. We all probably know that that is the entity led by Elon Musk that is digging into federal operations and purportedly trying to cut costs. Earlier today, Musk spoke via video at a forum in Dubai about what DOGE’s ambitions are.
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ELON MUSK: Well, there’s a few ways to describe it, but the actions end up being the same, which is, like, reducing the size of government. And making the government much more accountable to the people, I think, is going to lead to a better outcome for the people. You know, what I’ve said is that we really have here rule of the bureaucracy as opposed to rule of the people – democracy.
KHALID: Well, to make sense of this all and to make sense of this moment, we’re joined today by a special guest, our colleague Shannon Bond. She’s been reporting on government restructuring and all things DOGE for NPR. And, Shannon, it is such a treat to have you with us.
SHANNON BOND, BYLINE: I’m always happy to be here.
KHALID: I know. A lot has happened, I should say, since when we talked to you just last week – so frequent guest, I should say…
BOND: (Laughter).
KHALID: …But walk us through some of the more recent developments.
BOND: It really feels at this point there is sort of little part of the federal government, in terms of, you know, federal agencies, that DOGE has not touched. Just today, we’re beginning to hear about layoffs now happening at federal agencies – you know, which is, of course, like, one of the big promises they’ve made. You just heard Elon there talking about, you know, reducing the size of the federal government.
President Trump signed an executive order this week, making very clear that, you know, he is telling agencies that they need to be downsizing, they need to be constraining hiring. And we’re seeing this, you know, across agencies. One of the ones I’ve been reporting on this week is the General Services Administration, which is, like, probably the most boring agency in D.C. (laughter).
KHALID: OK. Yeah. Tell us, what do they do?
BOND: Well, they manage a lot of federal real estate. They do a lot of contracting, you know, for things like supplies and, like, technology across the federal government. You know, it’s a lot of kind of, like, the pipes that kind of make things work in Washington and also beyond, you know, at agencies and offices around the country. And staffers there have been told to brace for really steep cuts.
You know, they’re talking about slashing, kind of, costs across the agency, so that would include, like, employee salaries, as well as the contracts they do, and other projects, you know, by as much as 50%. And so, you know, this has all been moving very quickly. And, frankly, with not – despite Elon Musk’s claims, not a lot of transparency into, like, what is actually being cut, who is making these decisions and, ultimately, what that will mean for the services that many of these agencies provide.
KHALID: Well, I do want to follow up there on something you just said, Shannon, which is, who are some of the folks making these recommendations within DOGE to President Trump? I mean, presumably, these are recommendations – right? – and Trump ultimately has the final say on whether or not to reshape government as DOGE is suggesting.
BOND: Well, it seems that he actually has just sort of turned over a lot of power both to Musk himself, but also, you know, there are sort of DOGE-aligned folks who have been, in many cases, installed in the leadership of these agencies, right? So we’ve seen that at the Office for Personnel Management. We’ve seen that at the Office of Management and Budget, at CFPB and, you know, at Treasury, where you’re seeing people, in many cases, aligned with Musk. Some of these are, you know, other leaders in tech who are coming in and, you know, kind of taking the reins of these agencies.
But then, the thing that has gotten much more attention – right? – are these more junior people who’ve been given a lot of control. These are software engineers, many of whom have worked at Musk companies, have ties to Musk or also have ties to Peter Thiel, one of the other PayPal co-founders, who’s been a longtime ally of Musk. And these are software engineers who are going into agencies and being given really kind of unprecedented access to technical systems and to information about the workforce in these agencies.
You know, we’ve heard about, you know, people being called into interviews, you know, with representatives of DOGE. Sometimes, they’re not giving their full names. It’s not always clear exactly what their positions are. Like, do they work for the agency? Do they work for this DOGE organization? They are interviewing people about their jobs, what they do. And folks that we have talked to, you know, say, sort of – they feel the clear implication is they’re sort of having to, like, audition to keep their jobs.
KURTZLEBEN: I just want to jump in and add that DOGE stands for Department of Government Efficiency. It is not a cabinet department, and this gets at something that Shannon is saying, which is, when you look at the Department of Energy, HHS, any of these other departments, the heads of them get confirmed by the Senate. High-ranking people in the government are political appointees. They are approved by the Senate. But Elon Musk and his deputies were not approved. That is a major difference from other departments.
KHALID: And this presumably raises a lot of questions about transparency. And, you know, DOGE has promised that its actions would be transparent and accessible to the public. In fact, I want you all to take a listen to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt just yesterday at the White House.
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KAROLINE LEAVITT: President Trump and Elon Musk have been incredibly transparent on what DOGE is doing. There is an X account with the DOGE handle. They are tweeting out what they are doing on a daily basis. They have a website where they are posting the receipts of the contracts that they are reviewing and the payments that they have stopped from going out the door – the secretaries of our departments have stopped from going out the door.
KHALID: So, Danielle, are they actually being transparent?
KURTZLEBEN: No. I was in the press briefing room yesterday as Karoline Leavitt was saying that, and I had my laptop on my lap, and I was looking at the DOGE website. As of the time of the briefing yesterday, there was nothing there beyond the DOGE logo.
KHALID: Oh, wow.
KURTZLEBEN: And this is something Musk had claimed in that Oval Office meeting the day before – right? – where he had said the stuff is on the website. So then, after the press briefing, I asked a White House spokesperson, OK, what did Karoline mean? And they told me that she actually meant the DOGE X account, the X account for the Department of Government Efficiency. Well, this is not transparency in the sense of actually putting out all of the information. This is putting out the information that they want to put out, right? They are tweeting out the stuff that they want to tweet out. This is not a spreadsheet of here is who, what, why we have canceled.
And after all of this discussion and questioning about the DOGE website yesterday, the DOGE website did change by the end of the day. By the end of the day, they had added, first of all, on the main website, a feed of the DOGE X account, but there’s also a savings tab you can click on. I am looking at it right now. Karoline Leavitt had promised, quote-unquote, “receipts” yesterday. Well, if you click on savings, it says, receipts coming soon, no later than Valentine’s Day. And there is a festive heart emoji with an arrow through it, so…
BOND: OK.
KURTZLEBEN: …Presumably, in the next couple of days, we’re going to see some receipts. But we don’t know what that’s going to look like.
KHALID: All right. Well, on that note, let’s take a quick break, and we’ll be back in a moment.
And we’re back. And, Danielle, on the question of transparency, I want to ask you about this extremely unusual moment that we witnessed in the Oval Office this week, and that is when Elon Musk appeared next to Donald Trump and took a whole bunch of questions from reporters. Some would argue, in defense of the administration, well, hey, isn’t that transparent?
KURTZLEBEN: Sure, they put him forward, and he answered questions, but a lot of what he was doing was making the case for DOGE and saying, hey, DOGE is super great. He was talking about why DOGE is doing what it’s doing and why it’s so wonderful, saying that the U.S. is not a democracy, it’s a bureaucracy, and that these unelected bureaucrats are running your government – the irony being that he is unelected and his deputies are unelected.
But also ticking through this list of waste, fraud and abuse that he has purportedly found, talking about someone who is 150 years old and still receiving Social Security payments, for example, that sort of thing. But we have not seen receipts, and so his appearance raised a lot of questions even while answering some reporter questions.
BOND: I want to add here. I mean, so one of the things we can ask is, like, why do we care so much about transparency here, right? So, like, obviously, there’s the initial answer of, like, this is the federal government. Like, yes, we sort of – we do want to know kind of what they’re deciding to spend money on, what they’re deciding not to spend money on, what these changes are. There’s also the issue of, specifically, transparency around Elon Musk. As Danielle said, he was unelected. He has been made a special government employee, which means that you sort of have this sort of brief window to work for the federal government.
But at the same time, he runs six companies, many of which are government contractors, including SpaceX, the rocket company – many of which are under investigation by federal agencies, you know, including, like, the Department of Transportation looking at Tesla. And so, you know, there are some real questions here about if Musk is exerting what seems like pretty significant control over agencies, which include agencies that regulate his businesses, you know, where are the conflicts of interest here?
And we just have not really seen any sort of true transparency around that. I mean, Musk and Trump have both said, basically, Musk is going to police his own conflict of interest. He’ll decide, you know, when he needs to recuse himself, but, you know, there’s no sort of public accountability for that.
He does need to file disclosure forms, but the White House has said those are not going to be made public. And then also, DOGE itself is an office that’s been put under the Executive Office of the President, and a DOGE spokesperson has said that means it is subject to presidential records, which means, basically, it gets to be shielded from things like Freedom of Information Act requests for quite a long time after the Trump administration.
And so, again, like, our ability to actually see the work that is being done by this team that Musk has created here, it’s just really there’s a lot of questions about, like, what we’re actually going to be able to find out about the decision-making process and, back to your question, Asma, like, who is making these decisions.
KHALID: It sounds like all of this is so unprecedented. And yet, Shannon, as quickly and as swiftly as DOGE has been moving, a number of these steps have been put on hold by federal courts, right? I mean, talk to us about that.
BOND: Yeah, there have been just, like, a slew of lawsuits challenging what they’re doing. But, you know, they are getting some pushback. A lot of these cases, though, are going to take a while to roll out, and in the meantime, we are seeing kind of the impact of the actions in terms of the kinds of access Musk and his team have more broadly, as well as, like, you know, just the kind of, what they’re doing in terms of effectively stopping the work at many of these agencies.
KHALID: Danielle, what are you hearing from the White House in response to these legal challenges?
KURTZLEBEN: Well, yesterday at the press briefing, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt got very strident about this. She, first of all, chastised the press for saying that there might be a constitutional crisis happening right now, and she turned that back on the president’s opponents. She said, quote, “the real constitutional crisis is taking place within our judicial branch, where district court judges in liberal districts across the country are abusing their power to unilaterally block President Trump’s basic executive authority.”
And we should add here that Trump always said he was going to shake up government. Well, he’s doing it. And he said he would bring Elon Musk on, and, well, Elon Musk is doing it. And Elon Musk himself made that case in the Oval Office the other day himself, saying the people voted for this – we’re just doing what they want.
KHALID: All right, well, that is a wrap for today’s conversation. Shannon, thank you very much, as always.
BOND: Thanks for having me.
KHALID: I’m Asma Khalid. I cover the White House.
KURTZLEBEN: And I’m Danielle Kurtzleben. I also cover the White House.
KHALID: And thank you all, as always, for listening to the NPR POLITICS PODCAST.
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