Donald Trump remains publicly supportive of his billionaire benefactor Elon Musk, but some of the president's cabinet members and other administration officials are reportedly frustrated by the highly visible quasi-government official.
Musk's role in the administration isn't exactly clear, but voters have shown that they're not thrilled with the cuts he's making through the Trump-approved Department of Government Efficiency. Puck senior political correspondent Tara Palmieri told CNN that Republicans are quietly grumbling about the power the president has given the tech mogul.
"His role is clearly a layer above cabinet and closer to the president, but he was an unelected official and he wasn't Senate-confirmed and yet he is telling these cabinet officials what programs they need to cut, which employees they need to fire, and these people are just getting into their roles right now, and they're just managing the situation, trying to figure out how the place works," Palmieri said.
"Here you've got Elon Musk and 40 people," she added, "a very small staff that does not have the time to actually go through and understand these departments, these agencies, these programs, these grants, and figure out what is needed and what's not, and they're just haphazardly getting rid of things, and here you have department heads taking calls from members of Congress, senators who are saying don't let him cut these programs, like Katie Britt, the senator from Alabama.
"You know, she's been back-channeling to cabinet secretaries, saying if he touches NIH funding that goes to the University of Alabama, like, do not let him anywhere near that because it's hundreds of millions of dollars that her state gets, and I think, you know, in rhetoric, Republicans are fiscally conservative, but if you actually try to touch the programs or the entitlements that their constituents use, that's very unpopular."
Trump insisted on Truth Social Wednesday that all of his cabinet members were "extremely happy" with Musk, whom he credited in another post Wednesday morning for his election win, but CNN's John Berman said that's not what his network's reporters are hearing.
"It does seem as if in the last week or few days, something has changed," Berman said. "Again, you guys called it the 'Icarus moment,' crossing some kind of a line there. Washington Post reports that some people inside the administration are frustrated, we're getting the same thing here at CNN. We're hearing that cabinet secretaries are frustrated by this."
Palmieri agreed, saying that the tech mogul seems to have worn out his welcome with everyone except the president.
"I think he's crossed the line, especially these emails, that bullying email [demanding that federal workers] respond with the five things you did last week without any consideration of what this could expose," Palmieri said.
"By the way, a lot of people work on very sensitive topics, some of them related to public health, public safety, national security. You had Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, one of Trump's close allies, Kash Patel the FBI director, another very close Trump ally, telling their staff do not respond to this email because what you were working on, there's a very good chance it was classified, and the email you're supposed to [copy] your manager on it, which could expose the entire government organizational chart to hackers. And let's not forget that the email that it was going to, it was one single email to the Office of Personnel and Management, which has been hacked recently, in 2015."
"Like, these emails are easily accessible and the Health and Human Services, their administrator, wrote to employees saying, please, if you're going to respond, do not talk about any of the programs that you're working on, the drugs, the experiments, whatever you're doing, do not actually provide any real detail," Palmieri added. "Because you have to assume that whatever you send will most likely be hacked and then used by scammers, and it could end up in the, you know, this is the stuff that China spends, you know, billions of dollars trying to understand how our government works so they can mine it as a map, and this is just giving them more intel."
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