Senate confirms Howard Lutnick as commerce secretary; Marco Rubio attends peace talks with Russia
Trump portrayed Musk in their Fox News interview as a “leader” who is central to their plan to slash government spending, despite a Justice Department filing a day earlier downplaying the extent of Musk’s authority.
When Fox News host Sean Hannity referred to the tech billionaire Musk as Trump’s “tech support,” echoing a T-shirt that Musk was wearing, the president corrected him.
“He’s much more than that. He gets it done. He’s a leader,” Trump said in the taped interview.
Trump described Musk as a kind of enforcer for his executive orders that he said “don’t get done” when they’re distributed to government offices.
“He would take that executive order that I’d signed and he would have those people go to whatever agency it was,” Trump said, referring to Musk and others working for the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Trump mimicked the voices of DOGE workers talking to career government employees: “‘When are you doing it? Get it done! Get it done!’ And some guy that maybe didn’t want to do it, all of a sudden, he’s signing,” he said.
Musk and Trump, sitting side-by-side, spent much of the joint interview talking about cost-cutting efforts that Trump attributed to Musk. The interview broke little new ground but marked a very public sign that Trump and Musk were keeping a united front as DOGE remains under fire from lawsuits, street demonstrations and Democrats in Congress.
The Justice Department, in a court filing yesterday for a lawsuit that relates to the extent of Musk’s power, said that Musk has no authority of his own in his role with DOGE.
“Musk ‘has no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself’ — including personnel decisions at individual agencies,” DOJ lawyers told the court, quoting a sworn statement from Joshua Fisher, the director of the White House Office of Administration. Musk “only has the ability to advise the President, or communicate the President’s directives, like other senior White House officials,” the lawyers wrote.
The lawsuit in question was brought by Democratic attorneys general and argues that Musk is exercising government power beyond what he’s legally or constitutionally authorized to have. A federal judge today declined to immediately halt DOGE’s activity, even as she called it “troubling.”
