The following is a lightly edited transcript of the March 10 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
The rift between Elon Musk and Republicans is about to get worse. The New York Times reports that in an extraordinary Oval Office meeting, President Trump’s senior agency heads fought bitterly with Musk in all kinds of revealing ways. It’s only the latest sign that Musk’s project is fundamentally unsustainable. Musk wants to radically remake or even destroy the state, but the agency heads will be held accountable for what happens as a result—and they don’t want to take the blame for the disasters that Musk is unleashing. New Republic staff writer Kate Aronoff has a good new piece about some of the hidden impacts of all the cuts by Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, so today we’re talking to her about all this and where it’s going. Good to have you on, Kate.
Kate Aronoff: Thanks for having me.
Sargent: So The New York Times report is really something. We learned that Musk sharply rebuked Secretary of State Marco Rubio for failing to fire enough people. Rubio lashed out at Musk, insisting that he’d induced 1,500 people to take early buyouts, which is supposed to be a positive, I guess. There was a lot more like that, which we’ll get into a bit, but notably Trump then said that the agency heads would be in charge of firings and Musk’s DOGE will only advise. Kate, I don’t know how reined in Musk really is by this, but that aside, it’s clear Trump knows he can’t ask his agency heads to let Musk have his way with their agencies. What do you think?
Aronoff: I think it’s been clear how little coherence there is to anything that’s happening within the Trump administration, in that to even describe it as an administration gives it too much credit. What we’ve seen is that there are various agency heads, which may or may not have very much power, and then Musk goes in and mucks around in everything that they’re doing. That became very clear in this meeting today. And that generates, obviously, a lot of dissensus and chaos both within the agencies and within this thing called the Trump administration, which at any given point looks very different.
Sargent: The most telling thing from this meeting might have been what happened between Musk and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy over air traffic control. Duffy said that Musk’s DOGE boys are trying to fire air traffic controllers, and Duffy said he stepped in and stopped it. He said something like, I have all these plane crashes to deal with, and now you’re trying to fire those people who keep the crashes from happening? It’s almost as if the agency heads are privately admitting that what Musk is doing could cause absolute catastrophes. What’s your reading of that?
Aronoff: Well, exactly. The stunning thing about that exchange, in particular, having covered Sean Duffy a little bit, is that it takes a lot to make Sean Duffy seem like a cool-headed, even-keeled guy. This is the same person who proposed tying transportation funding to higher birth rates and marriage rates in different governments around the country. It’s nuts. You have that exchange, and then at the tail end of that, Trump chimes in and says, We should hire people who have high IQs from MIT to be air traffic controllers. So it is just a mess.
Sargent: What you said there is interesting because another element to their exchange—the one between Sean Duffy and Elon Musk—is that Elon Musk again raised the nonsense about DEI hiring at air traffic control. And Duffy actually said, No, that’s not true. And I don’t think they said this in the article, but basically Duffy, in saying that, was debunking something Trump has said.
Aronoff: Right. And clearly, to read not too far between the lines of that, Elon must saw a person of color who is an FAA employee, right? That is what all of this means: He just wants to fire as many people of color as possible, and will call them “DEI hires” or whatever he wants to in order to do that.
Sargent: Absolutely. And your piece from the other day really got the core nature of all this. You highlighted some of the work done by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. It might sound minor to some people—it’s a real niche, scientific thing—but the welfare of enormous numbers of Americans depends on it. Can you talk about what you found?
Aronoff: Yeah. Just to back up a little bit, insofar as most people know what NOAA is, they know that it makes weather forecasts or maybe that it does some scientific research. But what I, as a climate reporter, didn’t know really until this week is that NOAA has a really vast array of functions that it performs that businesses take for granted; that other government agencies, including parts of the U.S. military, take for granted. These include its “wet side” operations, which keep ships from crashing into each other, which, as the people who I talked to said, monitor very large watersheds for things like algal blooms, which can produce toxins, which have been known to poison dogs, cause nausea in humans, [and] are just really nasty things if they get into the water supply.
These really thinly staffed already agencies do critical work that if it’s not done poses enormous risks to public health, to economies, to tourism. You could go down the board of all of these things that we take for granted that NOAA does very quietly.
Sargent: And agencies rely on each other for this stuff. I think that’s a critical point here, isn’t it? The U.S. military relies on NOAA. Can you talk about that element of it? It’s not like you can just hive off the functions of an agency like NOAA and then just forget about it, you know what I mean?
Aronoff: Exactly. I spoke to someone from a Great Lakes research lab, which has about 50 people, had about 50 people working for it before these most recent firings. And one of the people who was laid off is someone who does the coding for the buoy system in the Great Lakes, which creates—and this isn’t so complicated but sounds a little scientific—the forecasts, which help the U.S. Coast Guard in search and rescue operations to provide realtime observations and data so that they know where they’re going and they know what’s in the water, whether that’s ice floes or other ships. That is really essential.
From talking to people across NOAA, both in that research outfit and elsewhere, these cuts were totally indiscriminate with really little attention, or any attention, paid to whether the people they were firing did things which would pose real material dangers to the U.S. and, in the case of the Great Lakes, to Canada, to other countries, too, if they’re fired.
Sargent: I think you’re highlighting another absurdity to all this, which is that one would expect that the great tech wizard Musk and his team of brilliant tech guys would be able to take this kind of thing into account. It’s supposed to be getting centralized through this thing called DOGE—and maybe Musk is running it, maybe he’s not, who the hell knows. But if you’re centralizing it, you’d think that these brilliant guys would take into account the holistic nature of all this, that they’d take into account the fact that if you cut here it might affect there. They’re not even doing that. They’re just doing it so indiscriminately across the board that they’re not even taking that into account. The whole thing is ridiculous.
Aronoff: Yeah, and I think you only have to look at what happened to X, the everything app, formerly Twitter, or even at Tesla to see the model here, which is to come in, slash as quickly as possible, regardless of how much chaos or real danger it causes. With something like Tesla where you have people dealing with, in some cases, dangerous chemicals, with really harsh industrial working conditions, if you say the rules don’t matter, rules are for losers, then people get hurt. And I think that happened at Tesla, and that’s happening now in the U.S. government with Musk in the reins.
Sargent: Certainly is. And there’s a level of cynicism here that’s really pretty disgusting. Trump and Musk and their propagandists know that they can dig through the federal government, pluck out things that sound obscure like battling bacteria in the Great Lakes or something, and then just say, Does taxpayer money really need to go to this? Right? But the thing is, in complex modern societies, we need the state to do a lot of things like this. Our well-being depends on it.
Aronoff: On the NOAA firings, briefly, one idea I had before reporting this piece was that they were going through cutting things that maybe had the word “climate” in the name or “environment” because they thought they were stupid or wasteful. But it’s actually a lot dumber than that. The people who were fired, who I spoke with, were probationary employees, which includes people who were recently hired, younger people who have very specific skills and are eager to put them to use for the U.S. government, [and] also people who have been in NOAA for a long time either as contractors who were recently brought onto the Fed side or who were promoted recently—so people who were actually doing very well at their jobs and had gotten new positions because of it. That was across the board.
It’s not as if there was any attention at all paid to what they were actually doing. It was simply just if you were in the specific class of employee—probationary employees—you were let go with almost no exceptions. There were some exceptions for more senior employees; but in terms of the jobs that people are actually doing, that was not a factor in whether or not they were fired.
Sargent: It’s all so ridiculous. The Times reported on another clash between Musk and the Secretary of Veterans Affairs Doug Collins, who said that firing huge amounts of people from VA might actually have bad consequences. This one is politically really dicey for them, but again, Musk doesn’t care. He’s not the one who will be on the hook. At the end of the day, it seems to me this is the crux of the issue, the crux of the conflict. These guys don’t want to be held accountable for Musk’s lunacy, do they?
Aronoff: No, not at all. I have a hard time getting too far into the heads of any of the people that Trump has appointed, all of whom seem to be either podcasters—no offense—or social media stars in some way with very little actual experience in the agencies that they’re running. But no, they don’t want to deal with whatever Musk is doing. [They] also probably don’t have very clear ideas about how to run these departments but are competent enough to recognize that whatever DOGE is doing is disastrous. And as we pointed out, for political reasons: Not only is cutting services to to Veterans Affairs bad because veterans need health care, but veterans are inordinately represented within the federal workforce.
The U.S. government employs a lot of veterans. And because of these firings, a lot of veterans will lose their jobs at the hands of Elon Musk. And that is just transparently a political disaster that you don’t need to do a lot of polling to recognize.
Sargent: A hundred percent. And Democrats are, I think, prosecuting that case at least well among all the things that they’re not doing well right now. I wanted to highlight something about the Rubio exchange that I thought was interesting. Rubio lashed out at Musk, essentially saying, I am firing people, but he didn’t actually stand up for the agencies that Musk is trying to destroy, like the U.S. Agency for International Development. One would hope that someone who is a good-faith secretary of state would recognize that something like USAID is essential to international diplomacy and international relations, but the debate has moved so far to the right that he has to defend himself in there with Trump sitting there on his throne presiding over it all. Rubio has to defend himself by saying, I am firing lots and lots of people. He can’t stand up and say, Musk shouldn’t be cutting USAID. It’s bad for what I’m trying to do.
Anoroff: Right. I wouldn’t go so far as to call this funny, but one interesting thing, looking at the USAID situation just from a left foreign policy perspective, is that it’s not exactly controversial to say that USAID is a tool of American soft power, right? That is a way that the U.S. accomplishes goals around the world and does many things that make people’s lives better—and it is not just charity. USAID is a way that the U.S. improves its reputation in various parts of the world, and that does good things and also has a realpolitik element to it that has not been secret at all. And so one would expect that that Marco Rubio, foreign policy hawk that he is, would support that. But also, a defining feature of this administration is that it’s full of cowards. And so he is, like his colleagues, a coward, and will not stand up to Trump because he doesn’t want to or is afraid to. It doesn’t really matter why, but nobody in this administration seems willing to speak ill of anything their boss is doing.
Sargent: It is interesting that Trump recognizes that the agency heads really have a rough situation on their hands in Musk, I think. We have agency heads essentially saying what we’re saying, which is that you need these agencies to do all these obscure things. They’re important. Trump’s own appointees are saying this now. The agency heads, as I said earlier, don’t want to be on the hook for the horrors that Musk’s craziness produces. Can I ask, Kate, is there some hope that this could function as a bit of a bulwark against Musk’s crazy designs?
Aronoff: I am wary to say that the people that Donald Trump has appointed will themselves act as a bulwark against Musk. I think the hopeful thing we could say maybe is that there is so much chaos within this Cabinet and Musk’s influence over every part of that, that parts of that will start to break down, that it will become overwhelmed by its own contradictions and start to become unfunctional. It is not functional to a large degree already—but as this continues insofar as it does, you might have things start to break down in a way that becomes much more obvious, and then hopefully that doesn’t harm too many people in the process.
I also think there’s a real possibility, and this seemed to be the case from this meeting, that Trump just gets really sick of Musk because he’s very strange. Musk is a very strange person who seems impossible to be in a room with or deal with in any way. And it’s remarkable that Trump has put up with him for this long, as divergent types of people who are very hard to deal with. So I think, and people have said this for a long time, there is some chance that they just get really sick of each other and he’s put out on the street. But who’s to say? I have not tried to make too many predictions about what’s going to happen in this administration.
Sargent: I do think it’s plausible. One other point to close this out, you mentioned that there are basically contradictions inside this project. And I think that’s really key. In fact, the contradictions can be mapped onto the MAGA coalition in a way. The MAGA coalition is getting strained by these contradictions. You’ve got, as you said, a lot of veterans in the federal workforce. We’re seeing on the news now lots of veterans getting quoted with some form of buyer’s remorse and complaining about what’s happening, rightly so. You’ve now got Musk digging around in Social Security, and there are a lot of aging working-class whites in the MAGA coalition.
So I got to think that as the midterms approach, or even well in advance of that, Republicans are just going to come under some pressure to do more here. It’s too crazy a situation. Republicans generally are acting these days as if they’re still going to have to face the voters again, amazingly. They’re not acting as if we’re not having any more elections. And I think that there’s going to be a point where these contradictions become too much for them to straddle; they’re going to have to step in, at least to some degree. What do you think? Is that too optimistic? Or are these contradictions, as you put it, really just deeply problematic for the Republican Party going forward?
Aronoff: I think there is a limit to just how much can be slashed before people get fed up, whether that’s the midterms or at some point before. The real question is: Even if it is the case that these cuts will stop at some point, that Musk gets kicked out, that we return to something that seems a little bit more like a normal government, how much damage is done before then? How many more people get hurt? How many essential government functions are degraded or privatized or sold off in some other way? And that’s a really scary question. I don’t think this will go on forever, but I think a lot of people can get hurt for as long as it does go on.
Sargent: A hundred percent. And then there’s also the corruption problem. These agencies are going to be deeply corrupted when a lot of the career people are pushed out. Kate Aronoff, thank you so much for talking to us. It’s not the cheeriest topic ever, but it was good to talk to you.
Anoroff: Well, I’m a climate reporter. I don’t get to talk about cheery things too much. Thanks for having me.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.