Transcription
Who's in charge at the White House? Is it Donald Trump, or Elon Musk? Elon can't and won't do anything without our approval, and we'll give it when appropriate. If it's not appropriate, we won't. This is because Elon Musk is moving at a pace and scale that must have surprised even Donald Trump, who put him in charge of downsizing the federal government. Has so much power ever been wielded by an unelected individual? Can anyone stop him?
Welcome to Americast, Americast, Americast from BBC News. Hello, it's Justin in the worldwide headquarters of Americast in London, England. And it's Mariana, AKA Misinformation, also in the worldwide headquarters with Justin. And it's Sarah here, paying a rare visit to the studio in London. Yes, I've come away from Washington D.C., where all the action is, but it's a pleasure to join you both here in the WWQ. I'm wearing a tie in your honor. For those who aren't seeing this, please visualize it. I also apologize for making you late, as we're a bit behind schedule. Although Sarah managed to cross the Atlantic in good order, I just arrived in London by train, which anyone who's recently tried to travel by train in Britain knows is difficult.
Anyhow, Elon Musk… you've had to drag yourself away from him, Sarah, but in the time you’re outside the United States, he'll have done all sorts of things. We can be sure of that. He might have closed a couple of agencies or departments while you're away. It's breathtaking how fast he's moving through the federal government. Donald Trump makes so much news daily that we may not have paid enough attention to what Elon Musk is doing – like shutting down USAID, the equivalent of the Department for International Development, which hands out tens of billions of dollars. He said he was feeding it into a wood chipper, didn't he?
Yes, and he's put a 90-day hold on pretty much all foreign aid coming out of America. I think around 40,000 federal staff have signed up for what's not early retirement, but deferred retirement. They’re taking the deal. The last thing I heard was that someone in the federal government wasn't sure about taking this deal because Elon Musk did this at Twitter (as it was then called) and reneged on some deals people thought they had. You'd be nervous, wouldn't you, unless it was watertight? Yes, you would. There's been quite a lot of coverage saying it's not necessarily watertight. What he did was offer people the option to leave by September, with continued benefits and a payoff. The threat is that if you don't take it, you'll lose your job anyway. There will be huge numbers of firings, some individually targeted – people doing jobs Elon Musk and Donald Trump don't think need doing, or who are "too woke" if they work on diversity, equality, and inclusion policies. But it's also just cutting the number of staff in the federal bureaucracy.
I mean, my friend is a doctor at the Veterans Administration, so it's not just support staff. It's always the case in these large bureaucracies, when you have redundancies, that those who can easily get other, perhaps better-paid work, leave. And who’s left? That's the issue. Is all this being discussed sensibly online, Mariana, or is it something else?
I spent quite a lot of time investigating and reporting on the Twitter takeover in late 2022 and into 2023. If you look at the blueprint of what he did there, it's almost exactly the same as what he's doing now. Anyone acting surprised is a bit silly, because it's exactly the same thing. We spoke about the "fork in the road" email before, which is how he laid off huge numbers of staff at Twitter. He used the same language regarding these government employee deals. But even things like… he's put beds in the federal personnel office for him and his team to sleep in. He did the same at Twitter, where he also auctioned off plants. Some insiders said he brought people into a room and asked, "Who wants what plant?" An engineer at Twitter in San Francisco told me Elon Musk would go to the office with his bodyguards. He creates a certain environment. He was really willing to lay off huge numbers of people. Many people I spoke to at the time said this was putting users at risk, that good people were leaving because they couldn't get other jobs. The tech industry is one where there are lots of jobs, and people often lose their jobs. It’s quickly evolving. So how does this play out in a government context? You imagine Donald Trump might be looking back at all this stuff with X. Even stuff like the Twitter Files – do you remember when he released those files showing evidence of bias in moderation policies, but also led to the doxing and abuse of Twitter employees? Now he has access to all sorts of things. You wonder what he'll release, how that works.
It's interesting on the subject of doxing, because he has this army of 20-somethings around him going through files. We might discuss the legality of this in a second, but they've been given access and scrubbed their social media profiles. We know some names, but not much about them.
Well, there's been drama this week around a Reddit thread. Reddit is a forum, a bit like Discord. There are threads where people identified people working for Doge, or who now possibly have access to this information, and doxed them. Doxing is posting personal information so people can be abusive. There was threatening language. Reddit suspended at least one thread. It's interesting because Elon Musk has explicitly condemned this harassment and doxing, and yet there are lots of examples of harassment and doxing on his platform that he seems okay with because they're people he doesn't agree with.
Is it legal, Sarah? There are legal challenges being brought, and we'll find out. But ultimately, in the US, whether something is legal depends on which judge you get. So cynical! So young! You go through different levels of federal judges. Cases have already been brought saying Doge staff shouldn't have access to huge amounts of personal information about Americans. But ultimately, you end up in front of the Supreme Court, which, with a conservative supermajority that Donald Trump appointed, tends to favor him. Not always, but if they can, they do. That's been their history. People are worried not only about cuts to government services and the people who run the government, but also the personal data Doge staff have access to. If you go into the Treasury, you can get everything – people's Social Security numbers (like National Insurance numbers, but more important to Americans). It's the key to everything in the bureaucracy. There's real concern, not least because someone who owns a social media platform and can monetize this kind of stuff has access to it. They say they're trying to find fraud in Medicaid, in particular.
Medicaid is the program supporting medical treatments and medicines for poorer or disabled Americans. If they're going through that with a fine-tooth comb and looking at individual cases, it will make you queasy if you're a Medicaid recipient, particularly if you're a vocal opponent of Elon Musk. These aren't necessarily people well-qualified to look at whether you deserve particular medical treatment. One would imagine the government is searching for fraud all the time, but these are very young computer scientists doing it now, rather than people qualified to do this. The other thing happening is not just cutting staff numbers – there will be far fewer people running the federal government. There's an ideological basis to what's going on, too. They're very deliberately getting rid of what Donald Trump would call "radical left lunatics," but others might call perfectly reasonable, slightly liberal members of staff. They're rooting out anyone not ideologically aligned to the Trump presidency.
But when it comes to that, can they not say, with some justification, that the administrative state tends toward a view of the world that's not Donald Trump's, and frankly, not the view of at least half of the American people? It's a mirror image. It's the opposite of what happens in the Senate, where the views of people in states like Oklahoma are hugely well-represented because they get two senators each, whereas people in California have much less of a say than they should. It's the opposite with the administrative state, because it's increasingly peopled by people who think the same way. That used not to be the case. In Reagan's time, you'd have had people in foreign aid agencies with all sorts of views about what money should be spent on. Over time, it's grouped around a certain worldview, and Elon Musk is busting that bubble. That's what a thoughtful Trump supporter would say.
It's interesting because, again looking at the parallels with Twitter, he brought in engineers from other companies he'd worked for, like Tesla. Many engineers inside, working in machine learning (how algorithms work, automatic detection for harmful content), were like, "What do these people know about the kind of work we do?" It's very specialist stuff. You can see that pattern unfolding with what Elon Musk is doing now. The positive, from some insiders at the time, was that it was good to have people from the outside without baggage, challenging biases. But the way it's done, and the loss of expertise and institutional knowledge, is a big deal for how these departments function.
Without wanting to minimize what can happen when you don't have people looking at online safety, you've described the possible problems of making excessive cuts in the federal bureaucracy and fixing problems as they come up. It's quite literally a matter of life and death for some people. There's medical and financial support coming from the federal government to some of the least well-off in America, and if you cut it out completely and try to fix your mistakes later, people will have lost their lives as a result. It can't be fixed. It's on a different scale.
What's the politics of it all? Is this all going to turn out to be an absolute disaster politically for Donald Trump and Elon Musk? What has happened politically in the week since all this took shape? I think there's a great deal of support from Trump's base. The things he's most visibly targeted, like foreign aid, aren't popular anyway. It's easy to characterize what foreign aid money was spent on as too woke or not in America's national interest. They're dismantling a huge amount of America's soft power around the world, as well as life-saving aid. But Donald Trump doesn't care about that kind of soft power; he doesn't see what America gets from it. So he's very happy to cut all of that and be the face of these cuts. There's no embarrassment about that whatsoever. As they go through domestic programs, they'll say that people suffering from the lack of government handouts didn't deserve it in the first place and need to stand on their own two feet. We'd have to go really far to hear stories of cruelty and unfair treatment before Donald Trump would worry that Elon Musk had gone too far.
I wonder if there's an attack line from the old-fashioned conservative Republican right (although they're pretty quiet at the moment). Back in the run-up to Obama, they were real sticklers for the national debt, which you hardly ever hear mentioned by Republicans these days, certainly not by Donald Trump. What they would say about all this is that if you don't get rid of or stem the flow of money into Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, and debt interest payments (which are massive), you're just tinkering. It's nonsense. I wonder whether that becomes an issue if they say they've saved X amount of money, and people say, "Hang on a second, that's tiny. Is this all this fuss for?" Donald Trump doesn't want to do that and has explicitly said he won't.
Yeah, Donald Trump doesn't care about the debt. You probably remember the bus stop near our office in Washington with an LED display of the national debt level. It's still there – trillions, I think. Donald Trump doesn't care, and he wants to renew his tax cuts, which will add further to the debt. That's not a concern of his. Musk has said he's going to reduce federal government spending by about a third. That's impossible without dismantling Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, and looking at the defense department budget, which they don't want to do.
Isn't there also a problem for Donald Trump that one of the narratives he built his entire election campaign on was the idea that elites aren't sticking up for you, and he is, and that there are unelected bureaucrats with too much power? Then he's got Elon Musk, who's unelected and seems quite powerful. He's a bureaucrat slayer. True. But you could see how, if you were a Democrat, you'd say, "Hang on a second, this very rich man is kind of doing lots with Trump." Does it work though?
Well, it doesn't and it's just quite interesting how they go about dealing with Elon Musk. Lots of people feel uncomfortable with someone from the outside coming in and saying they're all up for it. Politicians feel they represent them, but they're not so sure about this unelected rich guy who owns a social media company. I wonder how much Americans like that at the moment. I think that's more of a British thing.
I think Americans are more comfortable with wealth. They tend to think that with wealth comes a certain set of rights – almost. Remember Obama saying, "You didn't build that"? He was talking about people saying they were self-made Americans. He was just making the point that there's infrastructure (legal system, working water, etc.) that you didn't build. You used it, well done, but you didn't build it yourself. It never really worked politically for him. I wonder if you've stumbled on another difference between us and them, Mariana. If you've built companies like Elon Musk has and made a huge amount of money, that's a badge of success, and that earns you the right to bring the same ethos into government. Who wouldn't want the federal government run as efficiently as Tesla or SpaceX?
People say, when deciding who to vote for, "Donald Trump's a successful businessman. We need him running the business of America." That was one of the arguments I heard most frequently. We need a businessman in the White House who knows how to run the economy. He built up his own successful company and can do the same for America.
There's a perceptive question from one of our Americast listeners, David, who asks if there are parallels to be drawn between the events of January 6, 2021, and the current activities of Elon Musk. He says government buildings are being possibly unlawfully accessed in an attempt to thwart the will of Congress, all with the tacit approval of President Trump. That's a canny observation.
Is this the biggest flexing of muscle by an individual in American history? Probably not, because if you think back to the oil moguls of the early 20th century, there was a saying about John D. Rockefeller: the only thing he hadn't managed to refine was the legislature, but he tried. In other words, he really did control a lot of politics. We have had, in the past (albeit a quite distant past), very wealthy people with a lot of influence. Interestingly, I started reading more about the Gilded Age, having watched those tech oligarchs at the inauguration. From what I could make out, they didn't have anything like the influence that Elon Musk or some of these other people do. The biggest scandal was around a vice president's brother-in-law and whether he'd been unlawfully persuaded to do something. This idea of being inside the White House, even as close as Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos, is closer than any of these robber barons. You could also say they were eventually broken up; the great cartels were busted by government. Maybe they're not as powerful as Elon Musk.
David's point is very good: it's not just this unelected official doing this; it's thwarting the will of Congress. This is part of the power grab going on by the executive branch. We no longer have a careful balance of power between the legislature and the executive because Donald Trump is rampaging through government doing whatever he wants without any legislation being passed to allow it. He doesn't care whether it's unconstitutional or not; he thinks he can run everything from the White House and use Elon Musk to do a lot of it. It's an amazing fact that there's at least one reasonable interpretation of the Constitution (used to be the conservative one) that there are three separate branches of government, but Congress mandates stuff that's done and sorts out the money, and the president's job is to execute what Congress decides. We live in a really different space now, and America does. The Constitution has evolved, but in a way that constitutional scholars of yesteryear wouldn't have understood.
Previous presidents cared very much about staying on the right side of the Constitution and being seen to do so. Donald Trump doesn't care about that either; he's happy to test the boundaries and accumulate as much power as he can. Things like the potential conflict of interest of someone like Elon Musk, who has billions of dollars of government contracts going to the companies he runs… is anyone worried about that? Donald Trump says, "If Elon comes across something he shouldn't be dealing with, he will recuse himself." So let's not worry about it then.
I heard Ezra Klein from the New York Times saying that one of the things that surprised him was that we've all met Congress people. Politicians in Western democracies tend to have a strong sense of their own importance. It seems weird that members of the House of Representatives (where money decisions are meant to come from) have suddenly decided, on the Republican side, that they are nothing more than ciphers for a president. They have this sense of self-importance, but why aren't they standing up to him? Why aren't they saying to Elon Musk, "Come on, we've got to come to a public hearing; we're going to question you"? What's happened to that branch of government?
Part of it is the fear of what Elon Musk will do when you go for him. If you try to argue with him, you become a target on X. There's a huge army of people… that's not to say Elon Musk will abuse you necessarily, but he might reshare stuff that other people will then target you with abuse. Some of this stuff has huge implications for people's security and safety. They feel at risk. It stifles the ability to criticize Elon Musk. It's an incredibly powerful weapon. Twitter/X isn't that big, but it still has a huge impact on public conversation. After everything that happened around the election, and Elon Musk managed to create a conversation around Donald Trump, you can see why, if you're worried about your reputation or safety, you'd stay out of it.
I say that as a reporter who investigates X, and I only choose to tweet Elon Musk to ask him for an interview on a day when I can cope with a barrage of abuse. You can imagine what that's like for politicians who are up for election every two years and might face a well-funded primary challenge. The threat of a primary challenge is what has got representatives in line behind Donald Trump. No matter how safe your seat might be, he threatens you with a primary challenge to someone even trumpier than you. Elon Musk has used his platform on X to make that clear, to get an army of supporters saying they'll challenge you. That's how every single one of his controversial cabinet nominees sailed through their Congressional hearings and votes. Using Elon Musk to amplify the threat of a primary challenge is what's kept Republicans in line.
What Mariana is saying seems to be that social media is potentially undermining the American Constitution and the way it's meant to work. These things aren't much discussed except in podcasts and other places, but they are massively fundamentally important. We're all concerned about social media at the moment. We focus on the harms done to kids, but I'm not sure we focus enough on what social media has done to our politics. With regard to America, it's really salient.
This is a wider conversation about how democracy works. It relies on everyone buying into the way it works. It can be slow, boring, heavy, but it has relied on those things to function. Social media has thrown a bomb in because it's emotional, reactive. Respect for the process is gone. Elon Musk is emblematic of that, and we're seeing it play out in real time. People ask, "Is democracy going to die?" If you think of January 6th, that was one of the questions people were asking. Interestingly, the violence that unfolded feels less significant in this context than what Elon Musk is doing, which is about fundamental changes to how the system works. What does that mean for the long term? It could completely change what people expect of government. That's it for today. If you want to listen to more Americast, you can find them on BBC Sounds. See you all later. Bye-bye. [Music]