Musk and his ’humble tech support’ effort get star turn at Trump’s Cabinet meeting

Elon Musk leads government efficiency efforts, facing backlash and threats, aiming to cut $1 trillion from federal budget.

Elon Musk took a star turn at the first Cabinet meeting of President Donald Trump's new term, holding forth in a black “Make America Great Again” campaign hat on Wednesday (February 26, 2025) about his role as “humble tech support” for the federal government — and laying out dire stakes if his cost-cutting efforts fail.

“If we don’t do this, America will go bankrupt,” Mr. Musk told department heads assembled around a large wooden table in the Cabinet Room.

Mr. Trump, not one to easily share the spotlight, seemed happy to turn the top of the hour-plus meeting over to Mr. Musk for a “little summary” of what the Department of Government Efficiency has been up to, saying that Musk's team had found evidence of “horrible things” afoot in the government.

“He's sacrificing a lot,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Musk, referencing the time the world's richest man is taking away from his many business ventures. “He's also getting hit."

Mr. Musk, for his part, said his lightning-fast efforts to right-size the government had drawn death threats and he jokingly knocked his fist on his “wooden head” as he said he hoped to find $1 trillion to trim from the federal budget, an effort that has caused extensive disruption among federal workers and those who rely on their services.

Mr. Musk defended his weekend attempt to require government workers to justify their prior week’s work under penalty of termination — a move that drew pushback from many in the room on national security and privacy grounds — as merely a “pulse check” to ensure that those working for the government have “a pulse and two neurons," adding that “this is not a high bar” for workers to meet.

Speculating that some workers are either dead or fictional, Mr. Musk added that the goal was to see that workers are real, alive and can "write an email."