Trump Shares the Stage With Musk at First Cabinet Meeting

“If you are, we’ll throw them out of here. [laughter] Is anybody unhappy? They have a lot of respect for Elon and that he’s doing this. And some disagree a little bit. But I will tell you, for the most part, I think everyone is not only happy, they’re thrilled.” “The overall goal here with the DOGE team is to help address the enormous deficit — we simply cannot sustain as a country, a $2 trillion deficit. We spend a lot on the Defense Department, but we’re spending like over $1 trillion on interest. If this continues, the country will become de facto bankrupt. It’s not an optional thing. It is an essential thing.” “Is there a timeline in place for next moves for people being fired and when can the American people expect to see results from them?” “I think that email perhaps was misinterpreted as a performance review, but actually it was a pulse check review. Do you have a pulse? [laughter] Do you have a pulse and two neurons? So if you have a pulse and two neurons, you can reply to an email.” “We want to make sure that the people are working. So letters were sent out. And I think everyone at this table is very much behind it. And if they aren’t, I’d want them to speak up, but they’re very much behind it. Letters were sent out to people just to find out if the people exist. And the letter asks some simple questions like, ‘What have you done lately?’” “And I should say also, we will make mistakes. We won’t be perfect, but when we make a mistake, we’ll fix it very quickly. So, for example, with USAID, one of the things we accidentally canceled very briefly was Ebola, Ebola prevention. I think we all want the goal of prevention. So we restored the Ebola prevention immediately. And there was no interruption.”