A Trump-supporting actor begged the president to hold back a little on tech billionaire Elon Musk's mass firings from the civil service, and at least spare the government workers who voted for him, The Independent flagged Tuesday.
Zachary Levi, who had the lead role in the acclaimed superhero film "Shazam!" and was the voice of Flynn Rider in Disney's "Tangled," made the comments this week in an interview with Fox News' Jesse Watters, saying that Musk's Department of Government Efficiency initiative is "complicated" and causing a lot of uncertainty for people who don't deserve it.
“Like there are a lot of people that are very afraid right now because there are truly good working people that work for the government, that are getting lost in the cracks,” said Levi. “And we have got to do something about that.”
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“Please — Elon and all of your team and whatever needs to happen — please don’t let everybody fall through the cracks as we are doing what is necessary, which is to get in there and to like cut a cancer out, man,” he continued. “You know, sometimes they go in for cancer surgeries, doctors, and you lose some good healthy tissue along in that. They don’t want to do that, but it’s a part of like extracting that darkness out of there. And right now that’s what’s happening. But there are good people, people that voted for Donald Trump who are losing their job. And we got to make sure that we don’t leave those folks behind.”
Levi faced immediate criticism for the insinuation that only Trump voters deserve to be protected from the purge, and later walked this back in a social media post, saying, “I wasn’t pleading exclusively for Trump voters to keep their jobs. I was making a case for all Americans being lost in the shuffle, which you would understand if you listened to my earlier responses. I’m not fighting just for conservatives or MAGA or any other group of people, other than Americans. All of them.”
DOGE's stated purpose is to root out waste, fraud, and abuse in the government. Musk originally pledged to outright balance the budget with this project but has subsequently backed off this idea.
He and his team of software engineers have gained access to critical government systems containing sensitive taxpayer information, and suspended and fired workers all over the place — but so far, have not uncovered any new meaningful fraud, instead mostly just targeting lawful programs Musk appears to disagree with.
