Maggie Haberman Reports Trump’s Inner Circle ‘Happy To See’ Musk Leave
CNN political analyst Maggie Haberman said Elon Musk’s formal departure from the federal government is being met with elation among Trump administration officials.
President Donald Trump named Musk the head of the “Department of Government Efficiency,” an information organization that gutted a slew of federal agencies by laying off tens of thousands of employees and freezing congressionally-appropriated funding. The Tesla CEO originally pledged to find $2 trillion in “savings,” but so far the DOGE website reports cuts of just $175 billion. And even this figure is questionable.
Musk’s official tenure as a special government employee ended this week. On Friday, Trump hosted Musk in the Oval Office to bid him farewell and praise him for stopping a cancer study that Trump described as an attempt at “making mice transgender.”
Haberman joined Friday’s AC360 on CNN, where guest host Jim Sciutto noted that Trump addressed the “transgender mice” claim, but not “the very real cuts to USAID and the effects it’s having in many countries around the world.”
Sciutto asked Haberman if people in the Trump administration actually believe Musk’s boasts about DOGE’s efforts.
Haberman said Musk was “a source of consternation” for Trump officials because he “would make statements about fraud and waste that he was finding in the Social Security network, that there were examples of tons of people who were dead receiving benefits. But then he would not produce that information.”
Citing Musk, Trump repeatedly and falsely claimed that the Social Security Administration has been issuing benefits checks to dead people born in the 1800s.
Haberman went on to say that people in the Trump administration are glad that Musk has exited the government, at least formally:
Those headlines were problematic for Trump, politically, in their minds. They are happy… to have him go because, look, there are things [Musk] did that some of them are happy with. A bunch of them in Trump’s world came around to Musk. Many others, however, were not so happy. Mostly, he was a source of tension, and he commanded this social media presence where he could intimidate any of them as well. And so I think, you know, they are happy to see this chapter end.
Though Musk is no longer a government employee, Trump has said the CEO is “not really” leaving.
Watch above via CNN.
