Trump is giving Elon Musk an unprecedented amount of power

Welcome to 538's politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, senior editor and elections analyst): One of President Donald Trump's core campaign promises was to cut government spending and dismantle the federal bureaucracy — and two weeks into his presidency, he's attempted to consolidate an extraordinary amount of power in order to do just that. Last Friday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave the Department of Government Efficiency — a unit of Trump advisers led by billionaire Elon Musk — access to the federal payment system, giving DOGE a huge amount of oversight and power over how government money is spent. Over the weekend, two top officials at the U.S. Agency for International Development were also placed on leave for refusing to give DOGE access to classified information at the agency, which Musk now says he and Trump are shutting down. And on Monday, the Small Business Administration also gave DOGE access to all its systems.

All this has greatly alarmed independent watchdogs and Trump critics, who argue that DOGE is operating without oversight and point out that Musk, the world's richest man and an owner of several businesses that work with the government, could use the data he now has access to for personal gain. But do Americans share that alarm, or are they just interested in getting results? In today's installment of the 538 politics chat, we'll talk about whether this weekend's events — as big of a story as they have been inside the Beltway — will matter to the general electorate.

So, team: I know this story is still developing, but do we have any sense yet about how much Americans care about Musk's heavy-handed attempts to cut the government?

julia_azari (Julia Azari, political scientist at Marquette University and 538 contributor): The story really seemed to bubble over on Monday when Musk announced that he and Trump were trying to shut down USAID. This might be less true among the broader public, which may or may not have much of an opinion about USAID, and more among members of Congress (who gathered outside the agency to protest its dismantling) and the press.

nrakich: Well, it may be breaking through with the broader public too. Google Trends data is imperfect, but it does show that, over the weekend, Google searches related to USAID exceeded those related to the upcoming Academy Awards. And on Monday morning, Americans were Googling USAID more than they were Googling the search topic "pizza" at dinnertime on Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights!

cooper (Cooper Burton, researcher and copy editor): It's too early to have polling data about Musk's attempted dismantling of USAID, but we have seen surveys ask more generally about DOGE and its mission, and that data has been mixed. For example, in late January, Data for Progress found that likely voters supported the creation of DOGE, 46 percent to 36 percent. And an AP-NORC poll found that wide majorities of Americans think that issues like corruption, inefficiency and red tape are major problems in the federal government.

But they don't really like any of DOGE's proposals to fix those issues. Out of four proposals that the AP-NORC poll asked about, only one was above water: requiring federal workers to return to the office five days a week. Other ideas, like eliminating a large number of federal jobs or eliminating federal agencies, were quite unpopular, though large shares said they didn't have an opinion either way.

I think these latest actions with USAID and the SBA will probably provoke a similar response from the public: People like the abstract idea of eliminating waste and bureaucracy in the government, but usually dislike it when specific cuts have to be made.

nrakich: Just to add to this, Americans are also quite leery about their data falling into the wrong hands. According to a Pew Research Center poll from 2023, 81 percent of U.S. adults were concerned about how companies use the private data they collect from Americans, and 71 percent were concerned about how the government uses it. Musk kind of represents both in this case, so I don't think Americans will react well to him having millions of people's Social Security numbers.

julia_azari: I don't want to go all meta, but it also seems like we should ask whether public opinion matters here in the traditional sense. Is the administration worried about that, or do they see themselves as beyond that kind of accountability?

nrakich: Yeah, and it's also worth asking — how extraordinary is this? You're a scholar of presidential power, Julia. Is there any sort of precedent for the power Trump is delegating to Musk?

julia_azari: The short answer is no. The longer answer is "no, but you can draw a line to this from past presidential actions that shows us where this probably came from." And looking at how past presidents have used these powers actually highlights just how norm-shattering and extraordinary Trump's actions really are.

Modern presidents have long tried to gain more political control over policy, and that means navigating some tensions with Cabinet departments and other federal agencies, which tend to be more bureaucratic and staffed by career civil servants. Trump has taken this clash to what could charitably be described as the next level, but the desire of presidents to make things reflect their political agenda more is not a new thing.

I've been thinking a lot about the "czars" from former President Barack Obama's administration — people appointed to oversee a policy area from the White House by coordinating across different agencies. That seems like the closest analogue to what DOGE was supposed to be.

(And everyone freaked out about the growth of presidential power under Obama because a lot of the czars — which was not a concept Obama invented, by the way — were not Senate confirmed, etc.)

But that's not what DOGE has been. Musk is going beyond coordinating across departments — he's gaining access to various different areas of policy and operation.

nrakich: A less kind comparison would be to the "White House plumbers," former President Richard Nixon's Watergate-era fixers — especially to the extent that Trump's interest in cutting government spending is motivated by a desire to purge the bureaucracy of his political opponents.

julia_azari: Right. The plumbers were there to "fix the leaks," and with them you had a mission that was both very creepy (pun intended) and very much about using the power of the executive branch to punish enemies. But Musk has become very deeply embedded in the technical workings of government and its expenditures.

At the Treasury Department, Musk has taken technical control over the payment system (usually done by career civil servants) and is reportedly trying to use that technical capacity to stop payments for things he disagrees with. What I'm seeing here is the power of the presidency to enforce the laws and carry them out — and how Congress and the courts are much slower and more reactive. The Trump administration — particularly Musk with the takeover of the Treasury payment system — is literally executing policy at the most nuts-and-bolts level. This means that it's pretty straightforward for, e.g., a court to say that this is illegal, but the other branches of government, especially the courts, don't have much practical ability to stop Musk from doing whatever he wants.

I think the bottom line is that the executive branch is already sort of structurally iffy when it comes to concerns about too much power being consolidated in a few individuals. Cabinet department independence is one source of ballast there, as is congressional oversight.

The essence of rule of law is procedures. The essence of a democratic republic is that power is distributed among different individuals and groups. This is a fierce challenge to both of those ideas.

cooper: I also think part of the reason these moves have provoked such a strong backlash has to do with who is behind it all. Musk is less popular than Trump (his net favorability rating in the latest YouGov/The Economist poll is 6 percentage points lower than Trump's), and in the latest Quinnipiac University poll, 53 percent of registered voters disapproved of Musk "playing a prominent role in the Trump administration," while only 39 percent approved.

Americans also generally dislike the idea of billionaires or people without any background in government being relied on for policy advice, according to AP-NORC (although that has been a big part of Trump's general appeal, so I'm not totally sure what to make of those numbers). I think if Trump had instead tapped a bunch of insiders from his campaign or from Republican politics to carry out these directives, it could have come across a little bit differently. But the fact that it's the richest man in the world complicates things.

nrakich: Right. If Musk is seen as having a big role in Trump's administration — which seems pretty undeniable at this point — that could reflect badly on Trump.

cooper: And to Julia's point, it's also a pretty big departure from past presidencies, which saw power delegated out to more people. I saw someone the other day compare Musk to a head of government with Trump more akin to a head of state. I don't think that comparison is entirely accurate, but it does illustrate the degree to which Trump has given Musk a pretty unprecedented level of access and power.

julia_azari: I definitely do wonder about the optics of Musk's involvement. People want the government to be doing something, but there may be some sense of, "Who is this guy? Why does he get to do this stuff?"

This is another thing that's kind of unprecedented. Presidents have had powerful advisers before. There was an old joke about former President Dwight Eisenhower: "If Eisenhower dies, then Nixon will become president. If Chief of Staff Sherman Adams dies, then Eisenhower will become president." And sometimes there's a perception that the vice president has a lot of power — like Dick Cheney, which was true. But this is sort of a wild amount of actual power for someone unelected.

And a lot of those past figures were more controversial than people remember them, but Adams was nowhere near the level of Musk's ubiquity and controversy. Social media does change the game in that respect.

nrakich: As you pointed out, Julia, the presidency has been growing more powerful for decades — both because Congress and the courts have ceded a lot of their checks and balances, and because the president has started concentrating power in his White House over the federal agencies. Is this just the inevitable end result of that?

julia_azari: That's a great question, but I don't think it was inevitable. While I think that context is useful for understanding how we got to this point, there's been a qualitative shift in how this administration talks about accountability and rule of law. There's both a general approach of issuing a lot of sweeping policy changes from the White House instead of developing a legislative agenda, and also a willingness to flout legal boundaries.

To follow up on the Nixon comparison, there's sort of a school of thought that Watergate and all it entailed was the natural outgrowth of the "imperial presidency." But I don't subscribe to that (in fact, I have a book about it coming out soon). Instead, Watergate was caused by Nixon's specific response to his political circumstances, his unease with certain political opponents and his willingness to cross certain lines.

cooper: Congress could also be taking a much more active role in resisting these power grabs than it has been. Republicans in Congress have so far been pretty unwilling to cross Trump or speak out against these moves by Musk, but they don't have to be. Congress is (in theory) an equal branch of government, and it's a conscious choice by congressional Republicans not to assert more of their power.

And that's not even to say they should! Just to further illustrate the point that this isn't necessarily inevitable. Trump and Musk's decisions are being enabled by their allies in Congress (and potentially by the courts, though that still mostly remains to be seen).

julia_azari: Yes. There's really not much institutional prerogative right now.

nrakich: Why aren't congressional Republicans pushing back on this more? Fear of being primaried? Or are they genuine believers in DOGE's mission?

cooper: I think probably a bit of both. We've already seen Trump allies mount massive pressure campaigns on senators to confirm his nominees. But I also think many are pretty bought-in to Trump and DOGE's vision — they've already formed a "DOGE caucus" in the House, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has started scheduling hearings in her capacity as chairwoman of a new DOGE subcommittee. Those are signs that support among congressional Republicans for these sorts of actions is more than just passive acceptance to avoid a primary challenge.

julia_azari: Political scientist Paul Musgrave also wrote about the possibility that they are also scared by violent threats, which seemed credible to me.

I don't mean to suggest that the GOP isn't also moving in a more Trumpy direction — just that there are other theories around that could explain it as well.

nrakich: I know we questioned whether public opinion really matters in a cosmic sense here. But I do think there's one way it could matter: If it's unpopular, and it's making Trump unpopular, and he recognizes that Musk is a drag on him and tells him to slow his roll. How do you guys think this ends? Will Musk/Trump back off, or will DOGE achieve its goal of eliminating much of the federal government?

cooper: It does make me wonder how sustainable this all is. Trump hasn't even been president for a month, and his administration has already started to dismantle entire federal agencies. While USAID is a relatively unknown institution among a public that generally favors reducing foreign aid anyway, there's also been talk about targeting other agencies that have more of a direct role in Americans' everyday lives, like the FDIC and other banking regulators. If the public is already unsupportive of these initial broader moves, I have to wonder how long they'll continue to tolerate them when it starts affecting their day-to-day lives.

But again, that raises the question of whether public opinion even matters. I would guess that it matters to the extent that Trump thinks Musk is helping or hurting him. As others have pointed out, it does kind of feel like those two are on a collision course eventually. I have to imagine that Musk will continue to exert more control and that Trump won't take to that very kindly.

julia_azari: I've been in the camp of predicting a pretty significant clash between Musk and Trump in the future. I think public pushback, both broadly and in concentrated efforts, does affect these things, at least at the margin. But I'm not exactly clear on the dynamics or process in the White House, and what we've seen so far doesn't give me a lot of confidence that they'll pump the brakes. It doesn't seem like Trump is exerting a lot of control over Musk; in fact, he may see the billionaire as a pretty important source of political support, like threatening to fund primary challenges to recalcitrant senators. Similarly, Trump surrogates like White House Chief of Staff Susan Wiles don't seem to be doing much to contain the political fallout.

cooper: There's also the legal dimension: Regardless of what public opinion is, some of these moves are pretty blatantly against the law. USAID was enshrined by Congress and can't be dismantled solely by Trump (at least in theory). And then there's the legal debate over impoundment — i.e., whether the president is legally obligated to spend money that Congress appropriates. I think if DOGE doesn't succeed, it will be due largely to these legal hurdles and not necessarily because of public opinion or congressional pushback.