Speaker 1: This is part two of a two part interview with
Speaker 1: Victoria Elliott, a reporter at Wired. Victoria covers power and platforms,
Speaker 1: and she's been tracking a law Musks stage. If you
Speaker 1: haven't already listened to part one, Inside a Law Musk's
Speaker 1: takeover of the US government.
Speaker 2: People in Trump's orbit are a little uncomfortable with how
Speaker 2: much power Musk has started to wield, the fact that
Speaker 2: he's sort of running this almost parallel executive branch right
Speaker 2: via Doge.
Speaker 3: The New York Times reports the meeting of the minds
Speaker 3: this week wasn't so cordial, with Secretary of State Marco
Speaker 3: Rubio and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy reportedly getting into it
Speaker 3: with Musk over staffing cuts at their departments.
Speaker 2: Trump himself has not expressed these feelings. You know, He's
Speaker 2: done a lot to show that he and Musk are
Speaker 2: on side. He literally seems to have bought a Tesla
Speaker 2: this week.
Speaker 1: What's your best of what do you well?
Speaker 4: The car that I drive is the Models?
Speaker 2: Which is that one red one? In the moment, I
Speaker 2: like that, yeah, yeah. And he he has said very
Speaker 2: publicly that whatever Musk is doing has his blessing.
Speaker 1: I'm just telling people.
Speaker 5: This man is a great patriot, and you should cherish him.
Speaker 3: You should cherish him.
Speaker 4: You know, I have a little statement.
Speaker 5: We have to take care of our high IQ people
Speaker 5: because we don't have too many of them.
Speaker 1: We had to take care of Donald Trump's full throated
Speaker 1: support of Elon Musk continues, despite more and more people
Speaker 1: questioning one unelected billionaire has this much power over the
Speaker 1: future of the American government. Well, Musk claims to be
Speaker 1: bringing his business experience to cutting waste. His deeper motives
Speaker 1: are becoming clear, as Victoria Elliott's found Musk's actions come
Speaker 1: straight out of an ideological playbook that wants to weaken
Speaker 1: the government and unshackle business from overside. In Part two,
Speaker 1: we find out more about what Musk wants and what
Speaker 1: hey and He's loyalists will get when the job is done.
Speaker 1: Victoria is dieg has been making cuts? What has Congress's
Speaker 1: been doing about it?
Speaker 2: Yes, so there have been hearings, people have submitted testimonies.
Speaker 4: Get the empty seats here, where's Elon Musk. I'm sure
Speaker 4: he's a genius and is a very incredible person because
Speaker 4: of the wealth he's accumulated, but that does not put
Speaker 4: him above the law or the responsibility to come before
Speaker 4: this committee in this Congress.
Speaker 2: If he's so.
Speaker 4: Great, if these plans and all the fraud and abuse
Speaker 4: that he's found are so eminent, why isn't he here
Speaker 4: explaining it? You know why? Because he's out to privatize.
Speaker 2: But the reality is that congressional investigations can take months,
Speaker 2: they can take years, and so much of the Doge
Speaker 2: ethos is really bringing that Silicon Valley move fast and
Speaker 2: break things. You know, Congress could do an investigation, but
Speaker 2: the reality is that by the time they're investigating this,
Speaker 2: people will have moved on to new jobs, work will
Speaker 2: have ceased, things will have changed. The biggest thing that
Speaker 2: we're seeing is that people have taken to the courts,
Speaker 2: and the courts have issued injunctions against some of Doge's work.
Speaker 5: A federal judge, citing a risk of irreparable harm, has
Speaker 5: temporarily restricted Elon Musk's Government Efficiency team from accessing a
Speaker 5: critical Treasury Department payment system, the judges ordered.
Speaker 2: But even then, whether or not we're going to see
Speaker 2: sort of permanent rulings around some of this stuff is
Speaker 2: off in the future.
Speaker 1: How the federal work has been reacting to Dodge's agenda. Man,
Speaker 1: what's the atmosphere lock within these agencies? Amanible is turmoil.
Speaker 2: I think a lot of them are really sad. I've
Speaker 2: talked to people who have spent twenty thirty years in government,
Speaker 2: who have dedicated their lives to this work, who have
Speaker 2: forewent jobs that would have paid them more money. There's
Speaker 2: all these rules when you work in government, right like activities,
Speaker 2: you can participate, and you can't necessarily like and be
Speaker 2: politically active in the same way that a regular citizen
Speaker 2: can be. They have forewent sort of all of these
Speaker 2: different things because they believed in their work, and they
Speaker 2: believed in their commitment to serving the country. And I
Speaker 2: think a lot of them feel really bewildered as to
Speaker 2: how they have become the bad guy in this moment
Speaker 2: for Tory.
Speaker 1: You said, we are never really going to say the
Speaker 1: savings that have been promised by muskindage. So what is
Speaker 1: this really about? Can you tell me about the audiological
Speaker 1: reason for all of this activity.
Speaker 2: I definitely don't think it's about saving money. I think
Speaker 2: that there are experts who are more well versed in
Speaker 2: the federal budget than I that can sort of show
Speaker 2: you the ways in which getting rid of these programs
Speaker 2: is actually, over time, maybe less cost effective because you're
Speaker 2: probably going to have to outsource it to the private
Speaker 2: sector because that service may still need to exist. Things
Speaker 2: like that. First and foremost, anyone who was deeply concerned
Speaker 2: about waste, fraud and abuse, there's a system that exists
Speaker 2: for that. We already have government auditors. There are actually
Speaker 2: people who are specialized in this work, who know how
Speaker 2: to go into a technical system and evaluate, who know
Speaker 2: how to go line by line on a budget to
Speaker 2: make sure things are being spent correctly, who know how
Speaker 2: to go out to the field and do interviews and
Speaker 2: figure out if a program is wasteful. We actually have
Speaker 2: a whole system for that. And if DOSEE was really
Speaker 2: concerned about saving money, they might seek the advice of
Speaker 2: those people, or they might be particularly interested in reviewing
Speaker 2: the auditing system and making that more streamlined and faster,
Speaker 2: but they haven't. Ideologically, I think think we are dealing
Speaker 2: with people like Musk, Peter Thiel, David Sachs, who's the
Speaker 2: cryptos are that really do fundamentally on an ideological level,
Speaker 2: believe that the best thing for them and their businesses
Speaker 2: and people that they considered to be in their orbit
Speaker 2: is to destroy the administrative state.
Speaker 1: Coming up after the break, how those aligns with Project
Speaker 1: twenty twenty five. We heard at the lead up to
Speaker 1: the election about a thing called Project twenty five is
Speaker 1: planned by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative I think tank.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of fear about that plan, a lot
Speaker 1: of criticism. Trump denied he would be following it. But
Speaker 1: what's happening now sounds remarkably like what a Project twenty
Speaker 1: twenty five is actually asked for. So is that what's
Speaker 1: really going on? He is gotting the federal government and
Speaker 1: stacking it with loyalists.
Speaker 2: I think that's a big part of it. Yeah, Project
Speaker 2: twenty twenty five lays out a lot of different things,
Speaker 2: rolling back regulation, dissolving certain agencies or certain functions of agencies.
Speaker 2: I think we see a lot of parallels with Project
Speaker 2: twenty twenty five. But again, Project twenty twenty five is
Speaker 2: not the only place where this comes from. You know
Speaker 2: JD Vance, who you know himself worked with Peter Thiel
Speaker 2: before he was a senator. There's an ideological bent in
Speaker 2: Silicon Valley that in those spaces that really says that
Speaker 2: the regulatory and administrative functions of the government should be
Speaker 2: extraordinarily curtailed, and that more and more power should be
Speaker 2: concentrated under the executive branch. There are certainly certain parallels
Speaker 2: in the US and the twenty twenties to Germany in
Speaker 2: the nineteen twenties, where you know, you know, liberalism is exhausted.
Speaker 2: One suspects that office, whatever that means, is exhausted, and
Speaker 2: that is really what's happening here. By gutting these agencies,
Speaker 2: you are fundamentally undermining the power of Congress because these
Speaker 2: agencies are established and funded by Congress, meaning that if
Speaker 2: Congress lets this happen, if they're able to cut these agencies,
Speaker 2: take them over, access their data, possibly break many privacy
Speaker 2: laws in doing that, depending on how it's being handled. Really,
Speaker 2: what they're doing is they are demonstrating that the executive
Speaker 2: branch is the one that holds all the power. They're
Speaker 2: really looking at challenging the power of Congress and the
Speaker 2: challenging the power of the courts, and trying to concentrate
Speaker 2: the full power of the American government under the executive branch.
Speaker 1: Say Victoria is a tech rouder and someone very familiar
Speaker 1: with Silicon belly. The sands slock. They're trying to run
Speaker 1: the US government block a tech company. What are the
Speaker 1: risks of that happening, and what's the fallout from running
Speaker 1: a country luck America luck a tech company?
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, the country is not a company. Not
Speaker 2: everything is a market gap. When your education system fails,
Speaker 2: that isn't a market gap. If you run America like
Speaker 2: a company, you're going to leave behind so many people.
Speaker 2: And also the stakes of getting it wrong are so
Speaker 2: much higher. For instance, if you run a tech company,
Speaker 2: say an app like Uber, and your app goes down
Speaker 2: for the night, it will be extraordinarily annoying for me, probably,
Speaker 2: but certainly there are taxis and there's public transportation. There
Speaker 2: are other ways for me to get home. But if
Speaker 2: the government suddenly, say, shuts down payments out of the treasury,
Speaker 2: if the Department of Health and Human Services decides that
Speaker 2: we're no longer inspecting particular medical products or food, that
Speaker 2: impacts everyone. A failure in any of these systems has
Speaker 2: such greater consequences than anything that could happen with any
Speaker 2: particular app. And again, some of the most impactful things
Speaker 2: are not built to be for profit. You know, I
Speaker 2: think when I was working in international development. One of
Speaker 2: the initiatives that we really talked a lot about as
Speaker 2: something that was really important was GOVI. It's an initiative
Speaker 2: to develop vaccines for diseases where the people that are
Speaker 2: most affected by them are not essentially going to be
Speaker 2: great markets for pharmaceutical companies. So then vaccines for those
Speaker 2: diseases don't get developed because they're mostly for poor markets.
Speaker 2: So you need to have some kind of other way
Speaker 2: of funding the development of that kind of medical care.
Speaker 2: And even if the initial impotent is because you're addressing
Speaker 2: the needs of people in poor markets, the reality is
Speaker 2: we live in a global world. Addressing health needs somewhere
Speaker 2: else is key to making sure everyone stays safe, and
Speaker 2: there is no clear ROI on that until you avert
Speaker 2: a pandemic, you.
Speaker 1: Know, Yeah, what is the project late? What happens if
Speaker 1: succeeds with what they're doing, Where do we end up?
Speaker 2: Well, I'm going to have a very long four years,
Speaker 2: but I think we will see a terrifying amount of
Speaker 2: power concentrated in the executive branch. I think we will
Speaker 2: see a greater divide between the rich and poor, as
Speaker 2: people who are poor and rely on government services, maybe
Speaker 2: don't have access to them anymore, and I think we
Speaker 2: will see possibly exactly how well the American government was
Speaker 2: functioning beforehand in the act absence of the services that
Speaker 2: many people take for granted.
Speaker 1: And finally, Victoria, I just want to check in with you. Actually,
Speaker 1: I mean, you've been report experience reporter across the number
Speaker 1: of areas for for a while, and now what's the
Speaker 1: bean locked reporting on what's been happening at this time?
Speaker 1: What kind of impact has have been having on you?
Speaker 2: Very tired? I think it sort of feels like I
Speaker 2: feel a little like a top spinning that like if
Speaker 2: I stop moving, all kind of collapse. So it's better
Speaker 2: to keep moving and keep reporting, keep doing stuff. The
Speaker 2: thing that I feel most urgent about is the fact
Speaker 2: that you know, there's so much we still don't know,
Speaker 2: and you know, we're a small team. Other people are
Speaker 2: doing stuff now, so that's appreciated. But I think it's
Speaker 2: I think it's mostly that that the reality is we
Speaker 2: only have so much time. They're moving really fast, and
Speaker 2: we need to move fast.
Speaker 1: To Victoria, thank you so much for your time.
Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 1: You can find Victoria Elliot's reporting at Wired dot com.
Speaker 1: Also in the News today. Prome Minister Anthony Albernezi has
Speaker 1: said the government is open to request to send peacekeepers
Speaker 1: to Ukraine, and a virtual meeting attended by European and
Speaker 1: Commonwealth leaders on Saturday night, British Prime Minister Sakias damacall
Speaker 1: for countries to sign up to a coalition of the
Speaker 1: willing to protect Ukraine and push Russia for a ceasefire.
Speaker 1: Alberzi said it's in Australia's national interest to stand with
Speaker 1: Ukraine and Trade Minister Don Farrell will meet with White
Speaker 1: House Trade Representative jameson Greer today following a meeting he
Speaker 1: had with US Trade Secretary how it looked Big on Friday.
Speaker 1: The discussions are part of the ministers appeal to the
Speaker 1: United States that Australia should gain exemptions from President Trump's tariffs.
Speaker 1: Farrells is it's his job to find an offer the
Speaker 1: Americans can't refuse. I'm Daniel James. This is seven am.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening.