Welcome to POLITICO's West Wing Playbook: Remaking Government, your guide to Donald Trump’s unprecedented overhaul of the federal government — the key decisions, the critical characters and the power dynamics that are upending Washington and beyond. Send tips | Subscribe | Email Sophia | Email Irie | Email Ben | Email Adam MUSK’S FIRST CABINET MEETING: The spotlight at DONALD TRUMP’s first Cabinet meeting today was trained on — who else — ELON MUSK. Donning his trademark “dark MAGA” baseball hat and “tech support” T-shirt, the Department of Government Efficiency chief gave the Cabinet an update on his team’s work and took questions from the press. During the meeting, Musk said government employees would soon receive another email about their work — and doubled down on his promise that failure to respond could jeopardize their jobs. That follows the controversial email sent over the weekend asking employees to reply with “five things” they did the week before, sparking panic across the government as agency leaders issued conflicting guidance, with some departments telling staffers not to respond — an explicit break from Musk’s directive. The email was not a performance review, Musk clarified today, but rather to see “if you have a pulse and two neurons and you can reply to an email.” Musk and Trump said they were convinced some of the federal employees had not replied because they were dead. Read more from Irie on the meeting here. TROUBLE AT USAID: The consequences are already quite real at the U.S. Agency for International Development, with or without a new email chain. Today marked the latest chapter in the saga of an agency that has become a key focus of the administration’s effort to downsize the federal bureaucracy. As Reuters reported, the administration said in court today it has ended most foreign aid contracts and won’t meet a midnight deadline to pay contractors for completed work. WHERE WAS MUSK ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL? It might seem unusual that Musk — who is not a member of Trump’s Cabinet — played a starring role in today’s meeting and met with Speaker MIKE JOHNSON Tuesday behind closed doors. But the billionaire and his allies have argued for weeks that voters signed up for the Musk show. They’ve made the case that Americans voted to empower Musk to slash and burn the federal government when they elected Trump in November. During the 2024 campaign, Trump made no secret of the fact that he planned to tap Musk to head a government efficiency commission, and Musk served as a top surrogate for Trump in the battleground state of Pennsylvania. Vice President JD VANCE summed up the argument in a recent post on Musk’s social media platform X. ‘“No one voted for Elon Musk,’” Vance wrote sarcastically. “(They did however vote for Donald Trump who promised repeatedly to have Elon Musk root out wasteful spending in our government.).” Musk shared Vance’s post, adding emojis of the American flag and 100 percent. But an examination of TV ads in the 2024 presidential campaign exposes some holes in their argument. As any political admaker will tell you, poring over campaign speeches is not the best place to get a sense of how candidates aim to persuade voters. For that, you have to look at where they spend their money: ads. The Trump campaign and outside groups backing him did not mention Musk in any of their broadcast or cable TV ads, according to an analysis conducted by the ad-tracking firm AdImpact for West Wing Playbook. (Unless you count the $658 a group spent to air this Tim & Eric-style ad one time?) Instead, the top issues in their ads were immigration, inflation, crime and taxes — many of the concerns that voters said were most important to them. A group working to elect KAMALA HARRIS, Future Forward, spent nearly $9 million on a single week-long spot that criticized Musk and accused Trump of caring too much “about his billionaire friends.” Another group opposing Trump spent $140,000 on an anti-Musk commercial. Put together, that’s a relative drop in the bucket compared to the hundreds of millions of dollars that the Harris campaign and organizations supporting her spent on TV ads overall. In recent weeks, Democrats have seized on Musk’s position in the Trump administration as a legal and political battering ram, claiming that he has gained so much power that, barring confirmation by the Senate, his role exceeds constitutional limits. CHRIS MOTTOLA, a GOP media consultant, said that both Democrats and Republicans are being a bit dishonest when they talk about Musk. “It's disingenuous on the Democrat side to say that we're absolutely shocked that Elon Musk is part of the government when he was running around having rallies with Donald Trump,” he said. “And if you're a Republican, you can't really say that, ‘Oh, we said that this is exactly what Musk would be doing.’” HARRISON FIELDS, the White House’s principal deputy press secretary, said that “aside from fake narratives pushed by the media, DOGE’s responsibility to drastically reform the government with the help of Elon Musk should come as no surprise.” He added, “Americans supported President Trump’s promise to create a government efficiency commission on the campaign trail, elected him with a mandate to deliver on this promise, and still overwhelmingly support DOGE ridding our government of waste, fraud, and abuse.” MESSAGE US — West Wing Playbook is obsessively covering the Trump administration’s reshaping of the federal government. Are you a federal worker? A DOGE staffer? Have you picked up on any upcoming DOGE moves? We want to hear from you on how this is playing out. Email us at westwingtips@politico.com. Did someone forward this email to you? Subscribe!
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