THE MAGA REVOLUTION HOSTILE TAKEOVER: Elon Musk’s upheaval of the federal government shows no signs of abating. Up next in the billionaire’s crosshairs once he’s done with USAID: the Department of Education. Trump advisers are considering an executive order that would “shut down all functions of the agency that aren’t written explicitly into statute or move certain functions to other departments,” WSJ’s Matt Barnum, Liz Essley Whyte and Ken Thomas scooped. How deep it goes: Your most important read today is a six-bylined report from the NYT detailing the depths to which the world’s richest man is reshaping the federal bureaucracy. “There is no precedent for a government official to have Mr. Musk’s scale of conflicts of interest, which include domestic holdings and foreign connections such as business relationships in China,” the NYT team writes. “And there is no precedent for someone who is not a full-time employee to have such ability to reshape the federal work force.” The big takeaway: Even the White House sounds overwhelmed by Musk’s activity. “Civil servants … have been frantically exchanging information on encrypted chats, trying to discern what is unfolding. Senior White House staff members have at times also found themselves in the dark .… Several former and current senior government officials — even those who like what he is doing — expressed a sense of helplessness. … Trump officials have generally relented rather than try to slow him down. Some hoped Congress would choose to reassert itself.” Some more key nuggets: Musk is now a “special government employee” … Musk’s team at the Treasury Department has been granted “read-only access” to Treasury payments … Aides to Musk “have requested access to Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services systems that control contracts and the more than $1 trillion in payments that go out annually, according to a document seen by The Times.” The legal reaction: Federal employee unions yesterday sued to stop Musk’s team from accessing the Treasury system that controls the flow of trillions of dollars of payments, Michael Stratford and Sam Sutton report. What Trump thinks about it all: “He’s a very talented guy from the standpoint of management and costs,” Trump said of Musk yesterday. “We’re trying to shrink government, and he can probably shrink it as well as anybody else, if not better. Where we think there’s a conflict or there’s a problem, we won’t let him go near it.” On the other hand: The scale of Musk’s activities however have “renewed speculation within GOP circles about whether the mutually-beneficial relationship between the world’s richest man and the president will eventually implode,” our Holly Otterbein, Eli Stokols and Jordain Carney report. But Trump and Musk are on the same page for now, they write, and the president is “fine with Elon being the bad guy.” What Musk thinks about it all: “This is the one shot the American people have to defeat BUREAUcracy, rule of the bureaucrats, and restore DEMOcracy, rule of the people,” Musk wrote on X early this morning, in what was roughly his ten zillionth post of the day. “We’re never going to get another chance like this. It’s now or never. Your support is crucial to the success of the revolution of the people.” FIRST IN PLAYBOOK: INSIDE USAID... No part of government has (yet) been hit harder by Musk than USAID, where a grim mood of fear has seeped throughout the agency’s workforce, my ace Playbook colleague Eugene Daniels writes in to say. “Everyone is scared. I don't think anyone is surprised that we were the first target,” one USAID official told Eugene last night. “But everyone has been super shocked at the speed that this has developed.” How it happened: The official said a group of USAID officials were commiserating together on Sunday when, one by one, they began to lose access to their email and work computers. Lacking email, they’ve turned to private group chats to communicate. At no point have they heard from anyone officially affiliated with USAID. Even so, the message is clear: “If you wanted to reform the police, you wouldn’t fire all the cops in one day,” the USAID official told Playbook. “If you wanted to reform health insurance, you wouldn’t just stop health insurance. This is not about sustainable change.” What keeps them up at night: USAID employees say their biggest concern is not their own employment prospects, but what happens to the agency’s decades-long programs around the globe. The agency is the largest humanitarian donor in the world, even as foreign assistance overall amounts to less than one percent of the federal budget. Quote of the day: “It’s the richest person in the world taking away from the poorest people in the world,” one USAID official told Playbook. “People will die from this — like thousands, if not hundreds of thousands.” But but but: Musk, of course — and plenty more on the right — see USAID very differently. “They’re an arm of the radical-left globalists,” Musk wrote on X this morning. “Every aspect of government needs to be much more efficient, no exceptions. Classified world especially.” And here’s the new boss’s view: Secretary of State Marco Rubio accused USAID of “rank insubordination” in an interview with Fox last night, adding: "We had no choice but to bring this thing under control." He said: "They don’t consider that they work for the U.S., they just think they’re a global entity." The Dem dilemma: Our colleagues Hailey Fuchs and Katherine Tully-McManus have a good read on Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-N.M.), who is the top dog for Democrats on the DOGE subcommittee. Despite her intention to lead Dems’ fight against Musk’s efforts, the party can do little else other than make noise, they write. The academic view: “DOGE’s access to federal data is ‘an absolute nightmare,’ legal experts warn,” by Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney The betting market: “Investors are betting Musk and Tesla will make a fortune under Trump even as threats mount,” by AP’s Bernard Condon BIBI IN THE HOUSE NOW BACK TO BIBI: The ongoing sense of chaos around Trump’s zone-flooding policy agenda has overshadowed a big moment today: the first overseas leader to visit Trump’s White House. Trump and Netanyahu have had an on-off relationship stretching back years, working closely together during Trump’s first term but falling out badly when Bibi congratulated Joe Biden for winning the 2020 election. Today’s joint appearance will reprise that rocky relationship. PR win: Netanyahu has already framed Trump’s White House invitation as “a personal honor, a signal of his close relationship with the U.S. leader and a vindication of Israel’s actions over 15 months of war across the Middle East,” WaPo’s Shira Rubin reports from Tel Aviv. But but but: There’s still an awful lot of tricky stuff to be discussed, Rubin notes. The cease-fire in Gaza covered an initial 42-day period, and Netanyahu is now under pressure from his own hardliners not to implement the next phase. “The second stage, which includes declaring an end to the war and the withdrawal of the IDF, will not happen,” Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said at a news conference yesterday. Phase 2 negotiations were meant to restart this week, but have been delayed by Netanyahu’s trip, the WSJ notes. The big question for Bibi: Will he pay more attention to Trump than he did to Biden? Having claimed the cease-fire as a personal victory, Trump now has significant capital invested in making this work. But the president told reporters last night: “I have no guarantees that the peace is going to hold.” BEST OF THE REST THE PRISONS PLAN: Secretary Rubio — still in Central America — says El Salvadorian President Nayib Bukele has “offered to accept deportees from the U.S. of any nationality, including violent American criminals now imprisoned in the United States,” AP’s Matthew Lee and Juan Zamorano report. “After Rubio spoke, a U.S. official said the Trump administration had no current plans to try to deport American citizens, but said Bukele’s offer was significant. The U.S. government cannot deport American citizens and such a move would be met with significant legal challenges.” Meanwhile: Roughly 300 servicemembers are arriving at Guantánamo Bay “to provide security and begin setting up at a new tent city for migrants, as officials comply with President Trump’s order to prepare the Navy base for as many as 30,000 deportees,” NYT’s Carol Rosenberg and Eric Schmitt write. DCA CRASH LATEST: Crews began lifting the wreckage from the deadly collision involving an American Airlines flight and a U.S. Army helicopter out of the Potomac River yesterday, an effort that is expected to take another day and “will help investigators search for clues and give divers room to recover the last bodies of the 67 people who died in the crash,” NYT’s Claire Moses and Kate Selig write. Knowing the victims: “The Lives Cut Short by the D.C. Plane Crash,” by NYT. ‘THREAT TO DEMOCRACY’ UPDATE: House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is eager to hamstring his GOP opponents by delaying the forthcoming special elections for House seats,” NYT’s Nicholas Fandos and Benjamin Oreskes report. In recent confabs with New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, Jeffries has “aggressively pushed for legislation that would give the governor far more time to call special elections for unoccupied legislative seats,” they write. VEEP FILES: VP JD Vance will head abroad next week for his first international trip, to attend the AI Action Summit in France and then the Munich Security Conference in Germany, WaPo’s Natalie Allison, Cat Zakrzewski, Michael Birnbaum and Hannah Knowles report. UFO NEWS: “FBI agents who are part of a secretive group investigating the surge of ‘unidentified anomalous phenomena’ — government-speak for UFOs — are worried they could lose their jobs in the purge targeting officials who worked on Jan. 6 cases,” Daniel Lippman reports.
| 
