This is part two of a two part interview with Victoria Elliott, a reporter at Wired. Victoria covers power and platforms, and she's been tracking a law Musks stage. If you haven't already listened to part one, Inside a Law Musk's takeover of the US government.
People in Trump's orbit are a little uncomfortable with how much power Musk has started to wield, the fact that he's sort of running this almost parallel executive branch right via Doge.
The New York Times reports the meeting of the minds this week wasn't so cordial, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy reportedly getting into it with Musk over staffing cuts at their departments.
Trump himself has not expressed these feelings. You know, He's done a lot to show that he and Musk are on side. He literally seems to have bought a Tesla this week.
What's your best of what do you well?
The car that I drive is the Models?
Which is that one red one? In the moment, I like that, yeah, yeah. And he he has said very publicly that whatever Musk is doing has his blessing.
I'm just telling people.
This man is a great patriot, and you should cherish him.
You should cherish him.
You know, I have a little statement.
We have to take care of our high IQ people because we don't have too many of them.
We had to take care of Donald Trump's full throated support of Elon Musk continues, despite more and more people questioning one unelected billionaire has this much power over the future of the American government. Well, Musk claims to be bringing his business experience to cutting waste. His deeper motives are becoming clear, as Victoria Elliott's found Musk's actions come straight out of an ideological playbook that wants to weaken
the government and unshackle business from overside. In Part two, we find out more about what Musk wants and what hey and He's loyalists will get when the job is done. Victoria is dieg has been making cuts? What has Congress's been doing about it?
Yes, so there have been hearings, people have submitted testimonies.
Get the empty seats here, where's Elon Musk. I'm sure he's a genius and is a very incredible person because of the wealth he's accumulated, but that does not put him above the law or the responsibility to come before this committee in this Congress.
If he's so.
Great, if these plans and all the fraud and abuse that he's found are so eminent, why isn't he here explaining it? You know why? Because he's out to privatize.
But the reality is that congressional investigations can take months, they can take years, and so much of the Doge ethos is really bringing that Silicon Valley move fast and break things. You know, Congress could do an investigation, but the reality is that by the time they're investigating this, people will have moved on to new jobs, work will
have ceased, things will have changed. The biggest thing that we're seeing is that people have taken to the courts, and the courts have issued injunctions against some of Doge's work.
A federal judge, citing a risk of irreparable harm, has temporarily restricted Elon Musk's Government Efficiency team from accessing a critical Treasury Department payment system, the judges ordered.
But even then, whether or not we're going to see sort of permanent rulings around some of this stuff is off in the future.
How the federal work has been reacting to Dodge's agenda. Man, what's the atmosphere lock within these agencies? Amanible is turmoil.
I think a lot of them are really sad. I've talked to people who have spent twenty thirty years in government, who have dedicated their lives to this work, who have forewent jobs that would have paid them more money. There's all these rules when you work in government, right like activities, you can participate, and you can't necessarily like and be politically active in the same way that a regular citizen
can be. They have forewent sort of all of these different things because they believed in their work, and they believed in their commitment to serving the country. And I think a lot of them feel really bewildered as to how they have become the bad guy in this moment for Tory.
You said, we are never really going to say the savings that have been promised by muskindage. So what is this really about? Can you tell me about the audiological reason for all of this activity.
I definitely don't think it's about saving money. I think that there are experts who are more well versed in the federal budget than I that can sort of show you the ways in which getting rid of these programs is actually, over time, maybe less cost effective because you're probably going to have to outsource it to the private sector because that service may still need to exist. Things
like that. First and foremost, anyone who was deeply concerned about waste, fraud and abuse, there's a system that exists for that. We already have government auditors. There are actually people who are specialized in this work, who know how to go into a technical system and evaluate, who know how to go line by line on a budget to make sure things are being spent correctly, who know how to go out to the field and do interviews and figure out if a program is wasteful. We actually have
a whole system for that. And if DOSEE was really concerned about saving money, they might seek the advice of those people, or they might be particularly interested in reviewing the auditing system and making that more streamlined and faster,
but they haven't. Ideologically, I think think we are dealing with people like Musk, Peter Thiel, David Sachs, who's the cryptos are that really do fundamentally on an ideological level, believe that the best thing for them and their businesses and people that they considered to be in their orbit is to destroy the administrative state.
Coming up after the break, how those aligns with Project twenty twenty five. We heard at the lead up to the election about a thing called Project twenty five is planned by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative I think tank. There's a lot of fear about that plan, a lot of criticism. Trump denied he would be following it. But what's happening now sounds remarkably like what a Project twenty twenty five is actually asked for. So is that what's
really going on? He is gotting the federal government and stacking it with loyalists.
I think that's a big part of it. Yeah, Project twenty twenty five lays out a lot of different things, rolling back regulation, dissolving certain agencies or certain functions of agencies. I think we see a lot of parallels with Project twenty twenty five. But again, Project twenty twenty five is not the only place where this comes from. You know JD Vance, who you know himself worked with Peter Thiel
before he was a senator. There's an ideological bent in Silicon Valley that in those spaces that really says that the regulatory and administrative functions of the government should be extraordinarily curtailed, and that more and more power should be concentrated under the executive branch. There are certainly certain parallels in the US and the twenty twenties to Germany in the nineteen twenties, where you know, you know, liberalism is exhausted.
One suspects that office, whatever that means, is exhausted, and that is really what's happening here. By gutting these agencies, you are fundamentally undermining the power of Congress because these agencies are established and funded by Congress, meaning that if Congress lets this happen, if they're able to cut these agencies, take them over, access their data, possibly break many privacy
laws in doing that, depending on how it's being handled. Really, what they're doing is they are demonstrating that the executive branch is the one that holds all the power. They're really looking at challenging the power of Congress and the challenging the power of the courts, and trying to concentrate the full power of the American government under the executive branch.
Say Victoria is a tech rouder and someone very familiar with Silicon belly. The sands slock. They're trying to run the US government block a tech company. What are the risks of that happening, and what's the fallout from running a country luck America luck a tech company?
Well, I mean, the country is not a company. Not everything is a market gap. When your education system fails, that isn't a market gap. If you run America like a company, you're going to leave behind so many people. And also the stakes of getting it wrong are so much higher. For instance, if you run a tech company, say an app like Uber, and your app goes down for the night, it will be extraordinarily annoying for me, probably, but certainly there are taxis and there's public transportation. There
are other ways for me to get home. But if the government suddenly, say, shuts down payments out of the treasury, if the Department of Health and Human Services decides that we're no longer inspecting particular medical products or food, that impacts everyone. A failure in any of these systems has such greater consequences than anything that could happen with any particular app. And again, some of the most impactful things are not built to be for profit. You know, I
think when I was working in international development. One of the initiatives that we really talked a lot about as something that was really important was GOVI. It's an initiative to develop vaccines for diseases where the people that are most affected by them are not essentially going to be great markets for pharmaceutical companies. So then vaccines for those diseases don't get developed because they're mostly for poor markets.
So you need to have some kind of other way of funding the development of that kind of medical care. And even if the initial impotent is because you're addressing the needs of people in poor markets, the reality is we live in a global world. Addressing health needs somewhere else is key to making sure everyone stays safe, and there is no clear ROI on that until you avert a pandemic, you.
Know, Yeah, what is the project late? What happens if succeeds with what they're doing, Where do we end up?
Well, I'm going to have a very long four years, but I think we will see a terrifying amount of power concentrated in the executive branch. I think we will see a greater divide between the rich and poor, as people who are poor and rely on government services, maybe don't have access to them anymore, and I think we will see possibly exactly how well the American government was functioning beforehand in the act absence of the services that many people take for granted.
And finally, Victoria, I just want to check in with you. Actually, I mean, you've been report experience reporter across the number of areas for for a while, and now what's the bean locked reporting on what's been happening at this time? What kind of impact has have been having on you?
Very tired? I think it sort of feels like I feel a little like a top spinning that like if I stop moving, all kind of collapse. So it's better to keep moving and keep reporting, keep doing stuff. The thing that I feel most urgent about is the fact that you know, there's so much we still don't know, and you know, we're a small team. Other people are doing stuff now, so that's appreciated. But I think it's I think it's mostly that that the reality is we
only have so much time. They're moving really fast, and we need to move fast.
To Victoria, thank you so much for your time.
Thank you.
You can find Victoria Elliot's reporting at Wired dot com. Also in the News today. Prome Minister Anthony Albernezi has said the government is open to request to send peacekeepers to Ukraine, and a virtual meeting attended by European and Commonwealth leaders on Saturday night, British Prime Minister Sakias damacall for countries to sign up to a coalition of the willing to protect Ukraine and push Russia for a ceasefire.
Alberzi said it's in Australia's national interest to stand with Ukraine and Trade Minister Don Farrell will meet with White House Trade Representative jameson Greer today following a meeting he had with US Trade Secretary how it looked Big on Friday. The discussions are part of the ministers appeal to the United States that Australia should gain exemptions from President Trump's tariffs. Farrells is it's his job to find an offer the Americans can't refuse. I'm Daniel James. This is seven am.
Thanks for listening.