US President Donald Trump’s most powerful adviser, Elon Musk, made a rare public appearance at the White House on Tuesday to defend the swift and extensive cuts he’s pushing across the federal government while acknowledging there have been mistakes and will be more,
Stat reports.
Musk stood next to the Resolute Desk with his young son as Trump praised Musk’s work with his Department of Government Efficiency to slash spending and as the president signed an executive order to continue downsizing the federal workforce.
Despite concerns that he’s amassing unaccountable power with little transparency, Musk described himself as an open book. He joked that the scrutiny over his sprawling influence over federal agencies was like a “daily proctology exam.”
Despite Musk’s pledge to be “maximally transparent,” the White House on Tuesday fired the inspector general for the U.S. Agency for International Development, a day after the watchdog’s office warned that the DOGE-directed dismantling of USAID had made it all but impossible to monitor $8.2 billion in humanitarian funds.
Musk, taking questions from reporters for the first time since joining the Trump administration as a special government employee, defended DOGE’s work as “common sense” and “not draconian or radical.”
“The people voted for major government reform, and that’s what the people are going to get,” he said. “That’s what democracy is all about.”
