United States President Donald Trump has held the first cabinet meeting of his second term, surrounded by allies like Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
But one guest was arguably the most controversial: billionaire Elon Musk.
Throughout the public portion of Wednesday’s meeting, Musk stood to the side of the cabinet’s oblong table, wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the phrase “tech support”.
The majority of cabinet-level officials need Senate confirmation to join the presidential advisory panel. But critics have warned that Musk wields immense power over the Trump White House, without being elected or facing a Senate grilling.
After an opening prayer that thanked God for President Trump, Musk spoke to the reporters assembled for the cabinet meeting, offering a passionate defence of his work as head of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
Trump also addressed the prospect of peace in Ukraine, the tariffs he plans to impose and mass layoffs within the federal workforce.
But key members of the international press, including reporters from The Associated Press, were barred from participating in the meeting, amid an ongoing feud over media freedom and the use of terms like “Gulf of Mexico“, which Trump objects to.
Here are some of the takeaways from their meeting.
Musk describes DOGE as ‘tech support’
Dressed in his black “Make America Great Again” cap, Musk was one of the first advisers to speak at the cabinet meeting.
His remarks came within hours of an administration memo calling on federal departments and agencies to prepare to scale down their workforces. The federal government employs more than 2 million workers, many of whom are nonpartisan civil service members.
To start, Musk tried to play down DOGE’s role in the government, saying it was primarily tasked with updating government technology.
On the first day of his second term, Trump replaced the US Digital Service, a technology office, with DOGE, which absorbed its workers.
“I actually just call myself humble tech support here because, as crazy as it sounds, that is almost a literal description of the work that the DOGE team is doing: helping to fix the government computer systems,” Musk said.
He then pivoted to DOGE’s more controversial functions: laying off workers, slashing federal spending and combing through vast amounts of government data.
Earlier this week, a group of 21 DOGE employees resigned en masse, warning that the department’s functions were putting sensitive data security at risk. They also accused DOGE of dismantling “critical public services” and serving an ideological agenda.
But Musk argued on Wednesday that DOGE’s actions were necessary to reduce the country’s deficit.
He added that he was “confident” that DOGE could find “a trillion dollars in savings”. As of fiscal year 2024, the US government spent $6.75 trillion.
“If we don’t do this, America will go bankrupt. That’s why it has to be done,” he said.
Trump applauded Musk’s efforts during the meeting, repeating his calls for the Department of Education and the Environmental Protection Agency to be slashed or eliminated.
“I spoke with Lee Zeldin,” Trump said, referring to his hand-picked environment secretary. “And he thinks he’s gonna be cutting 65 or so percent of the people from Environmental, and we’re going to speed up the process, too.”
“We had a lot of people that weren’t doing their job,” Trump added. “They were just obstructionists.”
Still, Musk acknowledged the DOGE team had made some errors in judgement, though he promised to fix any mistakes quickly.
“One of the things we accidentally cancelled very briefly was Ebola — Ebola prevention. I think we all want Ebola prevention, so we restored the Ebola prevention immediately,” he said.
Musk doubles down on controversial email threat
As part of the push to whittle down the federal workforce, Musk had announced on Saturday that federal employees were required to respond to an email with a five-point list of their accomplishments over the past week.
That email came with a tight deadline: Monday. And Musk warned that noncompliance would result in employee terminations.
Instantly, Musk’s threat sowed confusion and uproar in the government, with some agencies advising their employees to ignore it altogether. Eventually, the government backed away from the Monday deadline.
But Musk has since renewed the threat, writing on his social media platform, “Subject to the discretion of the President, they [federal employees] will be given another chance. Failure to respond a second time will result in termination.”
Labour rights advocates have called the measure arbitrary and illegal. Musk, however, raised unfounded speculation at Wednesday’s cabinet meeting that employees who do not respond may be dead.
“I think that email perhaps was misinterpreted as a performance review, but actually, it was a pulse check review,” Musk said, chuckling. “Do you have a pulse? Do you have a pulse and two neurons? If you have a pulse and two neurons, you can reply to an email.”
The statement was similar to a previous false accusation Musk made about Social Security. He claimed that tens of millions of dead people were receiving Social Security cheques, due to an apparent misinterpretation of the COBOL programming language.
Still, Musk voiced further speculation on Wednesday that some federal employees may not have even existed in the first place.
“What we are trying to get to the bottom of is: We think there are a number of people on the government payroll who are dead, which is probably why they can’t respond, and some people who are not real people,” Musk said.
“Like, they’re literally fictional individuals that are collecting paycheques.”
Trump expands on ‘gold card’ idea
Trump, meanwhile, continued to advance a proposal to create an alternative to green cards, the identification documents given to lawful permanent residents of the US.
He has called his idea the “gold card”, and it would require prospective immigrants to pay the US government $5m.
On Wednesday, he announced that the proposed “gold card” would not only give immigrants the right to live and work in the US, but also serve as a fast track to citizenship
“It’s sort of a green card plus, and it’s a path to citizenship,” he said.
But critics have questioned whether the “gold card” proposal would be an avenue for fraud or whether it would function as an exclusionary device, providing immigration services only for the extremely wealthy.
Trump, however, argued on Wednesday that it would b