President Trump, appearing Tuesday on Fox News alongside billionaire adviser Elon Musk, defended his rush to gain control of the federal bureaucracy, bashed former President Biden and hailed the SpaceX CEO for implementing change.
"You write a beautiful executive [order] and you sign it, you assume it's going to be done but it's not," the president told host Sean Hannity at the White House during a pre-taped discussion. "He gets it done. He's a leader. He gets it done."
The Hill: Trump said he ordered the firings of Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys within the Justice Department.
Trump, who was in Florida as the interview aired, said he believes Musk ultimately will find $1 trillion in federal savings after he and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team estimated reductions of $55 billion to date in the pursuit of what they describe as waste, fraud and abuse. The original target, publicly pared down in early January, had been $2 trillion in savings.
"If the bureaucracy is fighting the will of the people and preventing the president — the president — from implementing what the people want, then what we live in is a bureaucracy and not a democracy," Musk added.
A month into his frenetic second term, the president also cheered his decision to rebuild U.S. ties with Moscow while distancing the U.S. from Ukraine's defenses in a war that started with Russian President Vladimir Putin's invasion in February 2022.
Trump said little about his promise to voters to lower prices, but he added details to his tariff policy by floating 25 percent on autos, computer chips and pharmaceuticals, suggesting that levies might rise over time.
Musk, whose influence and impact have sparked protests and demonstrations in several cities, was identified this week by the administration in a court filing as a White House adviser without authority to order federal action on his own. Critics have described Musk's involvement in purging employees and gaining access to information in Treasury, IRS and Office of Personnel Management databases as a risk and potentially illegal.
The tech guru's decisions with DOGE, chronicled from his perspective on his social platform X, are largely opaque. And White House Office employees under the executive cloak of the West Wing are not covered by the transparency requirements of the Freedom of Information Act. An assertion by DOGE on a website this week that it saved $8 billion while terminating one federal contract appears to refer to an $8 million contract and lacked documentation.
▪ The Hill: Senate Republicans say access to private IRS data by Musk's team is acceptable, but they urge guardrails.
▪ The Hill: The president's whirlwind first month leaves heads spinning.
▪ The Hill: Four takeaways from the Trump-Musk interview.
Trump, who anticipated in January that some of his executive orders and directives would be swiftly challenged in court, found support in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday.
Judge Tanya Chutkan rejected a request from 14 Democratic state attorneys general to immediately impose wide-ranging restrictions on Musk's DOGE.
The states, led by New Mexico, asserted that Musk's non-Senate-confirmed role is unconstitutional, and his team's access should be blocked in seven federal agencies.
Chutkan acknowledged the "unpredictable" actions taken by Musk's team but said the 14 states failed to provide specific examples of how the DOGE efforts would cause imminent or irreparable harm to the states or their residents. The mere possibility that "defendants may take actions that irreparably harm plaintiffs" was not enough to grant emergency relief, she said.
The administration, however, was ordered by a different federal judge on Tuesday to temporarily reinstate Cathy Harris, who chaired the Merit Systems Protection Board until being fired as part of the DOGE downsizing.
And there have been mistakes, the administration concedes. The Agriculture Department is trying to reverse the firing over the weekend of federal officials who had worked on avian flu response.
THE ULTIMATE SAY: Working to expand his reach over federal agencies, Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order giving his political appointees power over agencies that have long functioned independently from the White House. The order does not affect the Federal Reserve's sway over interest rate policy but impacts its other functions, such as regulations, bank supervision and its budget. The order is expected to apply to the Federal Election Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Trade Commission.
Among the turmoil posed by Musk's access to sensitive federal databases, civil servants purged by email notifications and the dismantling of several agencies are a rising number of protest resignations.
U.S. prosecutor Denise Cheung abruptly resigned on Tuesday after she declined a request from administration officials to freeze the assets of a government contractor, saying she had insufficient evidence to do so.
The Food and Drug Administration's chief of food safety resigned Monday, saying the loss of key employees overseeing the nation's food supply made his work impossible. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has vowed to gut the division.
During his first address as secretary to HHS employees Tuesday, Kennedy said "nothing is going to be off limits" within the overhaul he envisions. He said a new presidential commission would scrutinize childhood vaccine schedules, psychiatric medications and other frequent targets of focus on chronic disease.
The Hill: $1 billion in Department of Education contract cuts spurred "chaos and confusion."
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