Elon Musk was a staple of the first four months of the second Trump term. He was the face of DOGE, the informal Department of Government Efficiency, President Trump’s government-slashing entity.
And now, the 130-day timer is up on Musk’s role as a “special government employee.”
Musk said from the Oval Office Friday that he expects to “continue to provide advice” to the president, with Trump adding that Musk will “be back and forth” between politics and his businesses. But Musk’s formal departure from government raises questions about DOGE’s future without its figurehead.
Musk originally said his goal was $2 trillion in cuts. Then it was $1 trillion. That was eventually lowered into the hundreds of billions. It’s unclear just how much, if anything at all, DOGE saved the U.S. taxpayer. Consider: the miscalculations and errors, the IRS auditors cut (who could have collected revenue) and court cases, in which the administration has been on the defensive, arguing the constitutionality of the chainsaw-like cuts.
Trump has long seen the “Deep State” an enemy — and that meant federal civil servants, who have upheld the machinery and institutional knowledge across the broad reach of the federal government.
Lots of presidents have tried to cut waste, fraud and abuse, and few would say the government is run as efficiently as it could be. But no other administration has tried to make changes in such a chaotic and haphazard way. People have been fired, then put back on the job. Offices have been closed, then reopened because services like weather forecasting were actually needed in a certain area. Whole agencies were shut down and funding was cut off, but those changes are being challenged in the courts.
What DOGE has accomplished is a degree of trauma for federal workers — and that may very well have been the point: Get rid of thousands of workers and make government jobs, once seen as the most secure work, less attractive.
Politically, Trump used Musk as something of a lightning rod for unpopular cuts — which Musk became hip to and didn’t really like.
"DOGE is just becoming the whipping boy for everything," Musk told The Washington Post this week. "Something bad would happen anywhere, and we would get blamed for it even if we had nothing to do with it."
Now that heat shield is gone, and there’s a lot of cleanup to do.
Trump allowed to pause TPS: The Supreme Court on Friday allowed the Trump administration to pause a humanitarian program that gave migrants from certain countries temporary protection from deportation. The decision means that nearly half a million people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela could lose their legal status and potentially be deported while the case plays out in lower courts.
Immigration policy in the GOP megabill: The Senate will soon take up the sweeping budget package that House Republicans narrowly passed last week. But immigration advocacy groups say that if it’s passed as written, hundreds of thousands of legal immigrants could lose access to vital social safety net services. Read more from NPR’s Ximena Bustillo.
Issues in MAHA report: Last week, the Trump administration released a report offering its analysis of what's driving chronic disease among the nation's children. This week, NOTUS reported that the report by the "Make America Healthy Again" Commission cited sources that did not exist. A Health and Human Services spokesman acknowledged "minor citation and formatting errors" and said those issues have been corrected.
Off again, on again: That’s the story of President Trump’s tariff policies. On Sunday, Trump delayed the threatened 50% tariffs on the European Union that he announced last Friday. On Wednesday, the Court of International Trade ruled that the tariffs Trump imposed on most countries in April were illegal. The next day, a U.S. appeals court put that ruling on hold. Friday, Trump announced he's upping tariffs on imported steel from 25% to 50%. And, he appeared to reignite a trade war with China after writing on social media that China "TOTALLY VIOLATED ITS AGREEMENT WITH US."
Decades ago, Brazilian women made a discovery that allowed them to have safe abortions without a doctor.
Now, this discovery is changing the way abortions are happening in the US.
Meet the women at the center of this movement on The Network, the latest series from NPR’s Embedded podcast and Futuro Media.
Hear the first episode beginning Thursday, June 5th. Or subscribe to Embedded+ and access all three episodes of the series on that day, while supporting NPR and the team that makes Embedded.
Going Deeper: How Misinformation Makes It To The White House
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
President Trump echoed the false claim that South Africa is perpetrating a genocide against its white inhabitants during a meeting with the South African president. It’s not the first time that a falsehood that began on the fringes of the right-wing made its way to the Trump White House.
As Jaws nears its 50th birthday, British-South African endurance athlete became the first person to swim around the island of Martha's Vineyard on Monday, completing a 60-mile trek over multiple days to raise awareness about the plight of sharks.
Lewis Pugh, 55, swam multiple hours a day in the 47-degree water before exiting the ocean at the Edgartown Harbor Lighthouse, near where Jaws was filmed.
Pugh said he wants to change perception of sharks and encourage conservation efforts. About 274,000 sharks are killed globally each day, a rate of nearly 100 million every year, according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
