President Donald Trump has told his Cabinet secretaries they will be ‘thrown out’ if they don’t respect Elon Musk.
During his first Cabinet meeting on Wednesday, February 26, Trump praised Musk’s efforts for leading DOGE, which claims to have saved American taxpayers $65 billion by slashing jobs and programs.
Trump said Musk, who is ‘tremendously successful’ is sacrificing a lot to head up the agency.
When asked by a member of the press about reports that some members of Trump’s Cabinet are displeased with Musk’s power and DOGE’s work, Trump disputed it.
‘Let the Cabinet speak for a second,’ he fired back.
‘Anybody unhappy with Elon? If you are, we’ll throw them out of here. Anybody unhappy?’ the president asked.
The Cabinet members including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Attorney General Pam Bondi and more all shook their heads quickly.
The president went on to say his Cabinet has a ‘lot of respect’ for Musk.
‘Some disagree a little bit but for the most part, I think everyone is not only happy, they’re thrilled,’ he added.
Musk added that Trump put together ‘the best Cabinet ever, literally.’
‘I do not give false praise. This is an incredible group of people. I don’t think such a talented team has ever been assembled. It is literally the best Cabinet the country has ever had and I think the country should be appreciative of people in this room,’ the South African-born billionaire gushed.
This comes after CNN reported on Tuesday that Musk’s tactics have started to grate on Cabinet secretaries and members of Congress, citing a number of unnamed sources.
Those frustrations were amplified when Musk sent out a directive to the entire federal government to send an emailed response to the question, ‘What did you do last week?’
Cabinet heads and Congress weren’t given a heads-up about Musk’s mandate – which threatened federal employees with termination if they didn’t respond.
Even a senior White House official, who refused to use their name, divulged to CNN: ‘A lot of agencies weren’t given a heads up, which caused some headaches.’
During Tuesday’s briefing, Leavitt insisted that ‘nobody was caught off guard.’
‘Did anonymous sources say that or did the Cabinet secretaries say that?’ she then said, challenging CNN’s Jeff Zeleny.
Zeleny replied that Cabinet secretaries and others said they were not aware that the Musk email was being sent and asked if there would be any ‘give and take’ at the Cabinet meeting.
‘Is Elon Musk or the president open to any type of dialogue about who is actually in charge of the chain of command of these workers?’ Zeleny asked.
Leavitt said she rejected the premise of the question.
‘The Cabinet secretaries have not said that. I know anonymous sources, probably career bureaucrats, have leaked that to many of you in this room,’ she claimed.
‘But as I said at the beginning of this press conference, everybody is working as one team, and the president respects the decisions of his Cabinet secretaries to tell their staff not to respond to that email because they did so out of the interests of national security and they don’t want to, obviously, risk confidential information,’ Leavitt added. ‘It’s pretty common sense.’
