'Fire, investigate, prosecute': Analyst urges Trump to go after DOGE workers

President Donald Trump has threatened to escalate his feud with tech billionaire Elon Musk into weaponized federal policy, canceling his longtime ally's subsidies and federal contracts as Musk rails against Trump and attacks his signature tax cut bill currently under debate in the Senate.

But if Trump wants to really bring the heat and do something constructive for the American people in the process, analyst Van Jones said on a CNN panel Thursday, he should start investigating the workers Musk brought into the government through his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) task force.

"Look, a couple of things," said Jones. "One is, you know, the power that Elon Musk still has is significant. Somebody said Trump has three and a half more years, Elon has 40. He's a billionaire. He's got a long-term play."

"I believe it was Elon Musk who said that," cut in anchor Anderson Cooper.

"Elon's correct. You good at math?" said Jones, to chuckles. "But the other piece of it is those DOGE employees ... are very dangerous. If Donald Trump is smart, the first thing he's going to do is fire, investigate and prosecute all of Elon's people who are all throughout government with their laptops downloading data right now."

"You think he should prosecute them?" Cooper pressed him.

"Listen, I don't think that what they're doing is legal," said Jones. "A lot of them don't have the proper clearances. And I think that if you investigate, you'll find they've uploaded data into servers that are that are the wrong, the wrong thing to do. So I think there should definitely be an investigation there. If Donald Trump is smart, the leverage that Elon has is he left, his kids didn't. They're still in there. So this fight, if it's going to be a fight that Donald Trump prevails on in the short term, go after DOGE. Long term, he's got to steal the Republican Party to deal with an Elon Musk that's promising to spend money now in a decade from now."

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