The standoff at 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue was not much of a spectacle. On the first day of February, a handful of men working for Elon Musk had come to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), a few blocks from the White House, demanding full access to its headquarters. The agency’s staff refused. No guns were drawn. No punches thrown. Nobody involved the police. But in these early days of the Trump Administration, perhaps no other scene revealed more clearly the forces reshaping America’s government.
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00:00Time Magazine features once again Elon Musk, this time sitting at the Resolute Desk,
00:05normally reserved for the President of the United States.
00:08This time we felt that the actions that Elon Musk has been taking,
00:13and the kind of power he's been wielding,
00:16the ability to shut down entire federal agencies,
00:19the ability to strike fear in the hearts of millions of government workers in the federal bureaucracy,
00:26it shows that he's gone beyond just an advisor to President Trump.
00:30He's wielding power almost on the level of the President himself.
00:34The last time that we had Elon Musk on the cover of Time,
00:38it was soon after the presidential elections,
00:41and by then it was already clear that Musk would play a significant and probably dramatic role
00:47in the administration of Donald Trump.
00:50At the time, we compared Elon Musk's influence to that of the newspaper magnate
00:58William Randolph Hearst back in the 1930s, who helped shepherd FDR to power back then.
01:07They have some interesting parallels, but what we're seeing with Musk today
01:10really eclipses anyone that we could think of in the newsroom as a historical precedent.
01:17Really never in the history of the United States, as far as we could tell,
01:22has a private citizen wielded so much power over the U.S. government.
01:28The ability to change it root and branch,
01:31the ability to snatch away the power of the purse from Congress,
01:34and make decisions that directly influence the way that money is spent,
01:40the way that resources are allocated within the federal government.
01:43Musk has shown an ability just in the first weeks and days of the Trump administration
01:49to do those things, to really impact the way that the federal government functions,
01:57the agencies that survive or don't survive in the U.S. government,
02:02and that is a really remarkable shift in the way American democracy works.
02:08One of the people we quoted in the story was Representative Jamie Raskin,
02:11who noted outside of the offices of the U.S. Agency for International Development,
02:17we do not have a fourth branch of government called Elon Musk.
02:22But more and more, I think, as the days have gone on in the second Trump administration,
02:27many Americans have gotten the feeling that Elon Musk is approaching
02:32the influence of something like a fourth branch of government.
02:36Certainly, he doesn't fit neatly into any of the other three.
02:40Some of the other branches of government,
02:44specifically the courts, have started to block and hinder some of his actions.
02:50Many Democrats, certainly on Capitol Hill, have really started speaking up
02:55and quite aggressively trying to push back on some of the things that Elon Musk is doing.
03:02We'll see if they have success.
03:03I think the courts have a much better chance of really making a difference
03:08in terms of controlling or providing some checks and balances to what Musk is doing,
03:14but that remains to be seen.
03:16One of the things that was really striking in the reporting for this story
03:20was talking to the people directly affected by Musk's effort to cut and cull the federal bureaucracy.
03:29These are former civil servants, now former,
03:32who lost their jobs because of Musk's efforts to cut workers, to cut the headcount.
03:40There were some really dramatic stories.
03:42People who had their email accounts abruptly shut off,
03:46who were locked out of the agencies where they had worked for many years,
03:51and they were really at a loss.
03:53Some of them didn't know whether they would have a job the next day.
03:57Some of them had just been informed very crudely that they were out,
04:02that they were put on administrative leave indefinitely.
04:06We talked to some of these people.
04:08We met them.
04:08They are coming forward.
04:10Some of them were too afraid to talk on the record and give their names,
04:15but I think the sheer number of people who were affected by Musk's actions
04:20suggest that we could see a groundswell of opposition to what he's doing.
04:24The people that he is affecting, federal workers,
04:29people who have worked in the bureaucracy for many years,
04:31they know how the government works.
04:33They know their rights,
04:34and they are beginning now to organize against what Musk is doing.
04:38I do think that in the coming days, weeks, months,
04:40we're going to see quite some pushback in the courts
04:43and potentially also in the streets to Elon Musk's actions and ambitions.