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Today, Explained
Elon and Trump need space
00:25:02
Vox’s Joshua Keating explains why the US government can’t have a big, beautiful breakup with Elon Musk. And now that he’s left DOGE, Elaine Kamarck from Brookings explains what happens to it.
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- [00:01]
Host
On yesterday's show, we talked about Donald Trump's breakup with a guy you may or may not have heard of named Leonard Leo and an organization called the Federalist Society. On today's show, we're going to talk about Donald Trump's breakup with a guy you've definitely heard of. And the breakup reverberated throughout society. It was the breakup that everyone saw coming. I probably don't even need to recap it, but highlights include Elon Musk insinuating that the government is holding back information on the president's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and Trump threatening to doge away all the money. The government gives Elon, two men, two social media platforms, one afternoon of next level pettiness. But then one week later, it seems over just this morning, Elon tweeted, I.
- [00:49]
Analyst
Regret some of my posts about President ealdonaldtrump last week.
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Elaine Kmark
They went too far.
- [00:54]
Host
What happened? Space happened. Elon and Trump need space on today explained. 3, 2, 1. Today explains Sean Ramis firm. If you were online or watching TV or listening to the radio or reading the news just about anywhere on planet Earth late last week, you were made well aware of the big, beautiful breakup. And it would most likely have looked like it was about Donald Trump's big, beautiful bill. But reporting that's come out since the New York Times has suggested it was also at least about space. Elon Musk got mad at his ex BFF Donald Trump, because Donald Trump reneged on his commitments to appoint one Jared Isaacman as NASA administrator. Elon wanted Jared Donald committed to Jared, but then Donald changed his mind because it turns out Jared's given a lot of money to Democrats.
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Elaine Kmark
And I say, you know, look, we won. We get certain privileges. And one of the privileges we don't have to appoint a Democrat.
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Host
Whoops. But now it looks like Donald and Elon might patch things up for the sake of space. Our colleague at Vox, Josh Keating, is.
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Analyst
Here to tell us why the US Government is still going to be in business with Elon Musk for the foreseeable future. And you know, during that feud last Thursday, Trump at one point said, if I really want to punish Elon, I'll cancel his government contracts. I don't know why Biden didn't do that. Well, they did talk about that when Biden was president.
- [02:22]
Host
I think that.
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Elaine Kmark
Elon Musk's cooperation and.
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Analyst
Or.
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Elaine Kmark
Technical relationships with other countries is worthy of being looked at.
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Analyst
You know, there were concerns about his political activities in the US his conversations with foreign leaders like Vladimir Putin, his business interests In China, there are a lot of people asking why this guy has high level security clearance. So there was a lot of talk in the aftermath of that kind of infamous podcast last September when Musk was sipping whiskey and smoking what appeared to be a mixture of tobacco and marijuana. I do not smoke pot, as anyone who watched that podcast could tell. I have no idea how to smoke pot or anything. I don't know how to smoke anything, honestly. There were a lot of questions about whether that was going to cause problems for his security clearance. And it appears it has prompted some sort of a review at the Pentagon why he's getting major national defense contracts. And the fact is the US Defense establishment and space program at this point are just so utterly dependent on SpaceX, on Elon Musk's space company, that unwinding it is probably a years long project, if it's possible at all.
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Host
How are they intertwined? Tell us how that works.
- [03:51]
Analyst
There's a few ways that it happens. The US military is basically reliant on SpaceX for its launch capability to launch satellites into orbit. The sort of game changing innovation that SpaceX had was the reusable Falcon 9 rocket which just cut the price of space launches massively. And that's become basically the workhorse for the US military and intelligence community, which is more dependent than ever before on on satellites for communications and surveillance. The military is also using SpaceX's Starlink network. There's a special kind of Starlink called Star Shield, which is just for the military. Musk's SpaceX, the makers and providers of the Starlink Internet, announced Starshield. It noted on its website that the Service quote, leverages SpaceX Starlink's technology and launch capabilities to support national efforts. There's sort of ambitious future projects for surveillance that are entirely dependent on SpaceX's launch capability. And beyond that in terms of NASA, it's if anything even more dire. I mean, basically losing SpaceX's Dragon capsule would basically make it impossible at this point for NASA to even have manned spaceflight. Since the cancellation of the space shuttle. For about a decade after that, NASA was dependent on Russian rockets to bring American astronauts the International Space Station. For very obvious reasons, that's not considered a very palatable option right now. So that means SpaceX is basically the only game in town. People may remember a few months ago they tested a new Boeing launch vehicle to bring two astronauts to the ISS. Three, two, one. Ignition. And liftoff of Starliner at Atlas 5 carrying two American heroes drawing a line to the stars for all of there were problems they detected on that launch and those two astronauts were stranded on the ISS for months until a SpaceX Dragon could be sent to bring them back home. So if you just need an indication of how much America's ambitions to have a presence in orbit depends on Elon Musk, that should really underline it for you. And I think we saw this on Thursday. He very briefly threatened to cancel the Dragon space capsule. If he literally did that immediately, it would strand some American astronauts in space right now. But he quickly backed off that threat, I think. But it was kind of a almost Trumpian like reminder of the interests he has. NASA also has the ongoing Artemis program. The goals eventually return humans to the moon, establish a lunar base there, and eventually that's part of like a longer term plans for Mars. And you know, at least from his rhetoric, Trump seems pretty committed to this.
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Elaine Kmark
And we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars. Launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.
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Analyst
Mars is somewhat of an interest of Elon Musk's. You may have heard it's not about going to Mars to visit once, but it is to make life multi planetary so that we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness to better understand.
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Elaine Kmark
The nature of the universe.
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Analyst
And you know, this Project Artemis is basically dependence on SpaceX's Starship launch vehicles kind of like built into all these plans. So if, if we want to get people back to the moon and back to Mars, it's kind of hard to see right now how we do that without SpaceX. If we still want to do that, it's going to require a major rethinking of a lot of aspects of that project.
- [07:56]
Host
And do American space ops have another option if they did indeed want to untangle themselves from Elon Musk?
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Analyst
Well, Boeing is building this new launch vehicle, but there are problems with it. It won't be ready for a while. You know, if anybody had a good day last Thursday, it was probably Jeff Bezos. A few months ago, Bezos company Blue Origin carried out the first successful launch of what it calls a new Glenn, which is a reusable rocket meant to compete with the Falcon for contracts including military launches.
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Host
Lift off.
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Analyst
And Bezos also has his competitor for Starlink, what he calls the Kuiper communications network. Both these projects have been beset by delays and so they're not really ready at this point for primetime to compete with Musk's network. But you know, I suspect, you know, if Kamala Harris had won the election, I think there would have been a big push to encourage alternatives, to encourage competitors to SpaceX. There was a recognition that this dependence the US has on one company had become a problem, particularly given the man who runs it. And I think now that may be a priority for this administration too, now that this relationship has gone south.
- [09:19]
Host
Is this a two way street though? So the government needs SpaceX, the government needs Elon, at least for now. But does Elon need the government? I mean, we've heard and covered many times the fact that he's reliant on federal contracts, federal tax breaks, federal funding.
- [09:39]
Analyst
Absolutely. The federal government's given him $18 billion over the last decade. That's just SpaceX. It's like a mutually assured destruction situation. I think they're both reliant on each other for the time being. And it's only going to get more. So, I mean, you know, I know you recently did a show on Golden Dome, and so he put out this.
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Host
Executive order in January basically outlining his.
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Analyst
Desire to have a missile shield that.
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Host
Can protect the country from threats.
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Analyst
So that's everything from hypersonic weapons to nuclear armed missiles. SpaceX, along with Anduril and Palantir, which are two other kind of Silicon Valley defense companies, both also run by prominent Trump backers, are together sort of bidding for the contracts for a large part of Golden Dome. This system's going to rely on this sort of massive network of satellites that to detect missile launches, detect where those missiles are heading, and maybe even fire interceptors to shoot them down. And critics are like, say it's impossible to build this in anything close to the timeframe and budget that Trump laid out. The advocates for the program basically point to SpaceX and its Starlink network, the hundreds of satellites it's been able to launch, as kind of proof of concept for why this is possible, that it is possible to launch this many satellites, it is possible to build this many cheap satellites in a short amount of time. The problem is there's only one company that's shown it can do that. And so I think if this feud is really so bad that SpaceX isn't bidding for US government contracts anymore, which I doubt is the case, I think that's going to require, you know, sort of massive scaling back of the ambitions for Golden Dome, which Trump has, you know, basically laid out as a, as a legacy project for him.
- [11:48]
Host
So what are we to take away then, if you were rooting for an Elon Trump breakup? Because, I don't know, you found it funny or you didn't like one of the Two, you might have, what, gotten ahead of your skis a little bit.
- [12:01]
Analyst
I think there's a couple things I would take away. I mean, one, I think a frustrating thing I see sometimes from, you know, folks on Blue sky, from, like, liberals who are opposed to Trump and Elon, is this idea that, like, he's just this complete charlatan who's never, like, built anything of value, that he just, you know, inherited money from his dad's diamond mine or whatever and just doesn't actually know how to build anything. I think things would be a lot simpler if that were true. I mean, 60% of of the active satellites in orbit around Earth right now were launched by this man's company. Like, he has built physical things in the world that, you know, the country and many other countries are increasingly reliant on. And that's real power and it's real leverage. And I think it's misguided to just, like, sort of treat him as this, this clown who has nothing sort of serious and physical behind him. And two, I think it shows the vulnerabilities that come with our reliance on this one company. And it's something people have been warning about for years. They warned about it because of China, because he called up leaders like Vladimir Putin, because, you know, most defense contractors don't have CEOs who are out there being openly partisan in the way. He is not even partisan in the US but, you know, endorsing far right parties in other countries and, you know, misinformed conspiracy theories and amplifying Russian propaganda here in the US like, this is not the kind of thing that the CEOs of, you know, the Lockheed and Boeings of the world are doing. But it's because this defense industry has gotten so consolidated that we went from, you know, dozens of companies at the beginning of the 90s to, you know, less than 10 majors today. That means these companies have a lot more leverage and the government has a lot fewer options to turn to.
- [14:01]
Host
Josh Keating wrote about Trump and elon@vox.com his writing is titled why Trump Probably Can't Cut Musk Loose. We don't know what's next for Elon and Donald. But one thing's for sure, his brief run at the top of a government agency is over and done with. We're going to ask how he did and what comes next for Doge when we're back on Today Explained.
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Elaine Kmark
I mean, my mind is a storm. You're listening to Today explained Elaine Kmark, and I'm a senior fellow at the Brookings institution. And for purposes of this, during the Clinton administration, I was Elon Musk. I ran the President's Reinventing Government program for five years. Then somebody else took it over. So I did exactly this. I did government reform and government cutting in the Clinton administration.
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Host
Amazing. That's kind of like a fun, you know, intro at a party. I used to be Elon Musk.
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Elaine Kmark
Yeah. Without the money.
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Host
Without the money of the spaceships. Okay, Elaine. Formerly Elon Musk.
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Elaine Kmark
Yes.
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Host
130Ish days Elon spent in the Trump administration. But before he entered it, he said he could cut something like $2 trillion of government spending. We had on our colleague Dylan Matthews, who said, good luck, Elon. Did he get there?
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Elaine Kmark
Oh, no, he's not even. He's not even close. I mean, by their own reckoning, they say that they've cut 175 billion. And everybody who has looked at the numbers finds that they're very, very faulty. There are all kinds of mistakes, including, for example, a contract for 1.9 billion.
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Analyst
They claim credit for actually canceled during the Biden administration. And an analysis from the Associated Press showed nearly 40% of contracts canceled by Doge are expected to provide no savings at all.
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Elaine Kmark
So even the 175 billion, which is a fraction of 2 trillion, is probably not real.
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Host
What do you think his legacy is if not the guy who managed to totally, radically reshape our federal government?
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Elaine Kmark
Well, he will not have totally, radically reshaped the federal government. Absolutely not. In fact, there's a high probability that on January 20, 2029, when the next president takes over, the federal government is about the same size as it is now and is probably doing the same stuff that it's doing now. Very high probability. What he did manage to do was insert chaos, fear and loathing into the federal workforce. And what he did manage to do, he's left a legacy of confusion and bad will.
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Host
There was reporting in the Washington Post late last week that these cuts were so ineffective that the White House is actually reaching out to various federal employees who were laid off and asking them to come back from FDA to IRS to even usaid. Which cuts are sticking at this point and which ones aren't?
- [17:26]
Elaine Kmark
It varies by agency. Okay, and let me just describe the arc that's going on in almost every agency. Doge came in with these huge cuts which were not attached to a plan, but they just picked. I don't know how they picked these out of the sky, but they picked numbers and said, we're going to fire this many people. Then what happened was two things. First of all, in a lot of cases, people went to court, and the courts have reversed those earlier decisions. Elon Musk and Doge dealt a major legal blow over their bid to take over the US Institute of Peace. A federal judge in San Francisco Francisco ruled the mass firing of federal probationary.
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Analyst
Workers was likely unlawful at usda, Defense Department, Energy Department, Department of the Interior, the Treasury, and the va.
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Elaine Kmark
So the first thing that happened is courts said, no, no, no, you can't do it this way. You have to bring them back. The second thing that happened is that cabinet officers started to get confirmed by the Senate and take their jobs. And remember that a lot of the most spectacular Doge stuff was happening in February in fe. Cabinet secretaries were preparing for their Senate hearings. They weren't on the job. Now that their cabinet secretary's home. What's happening is they're looking at these cuts and they're saying, no, no, no, we can't live with these cuts because we have a mission to do. As the government tries to hire back the people they fired, they're going to have a tough time, and they're going to have a tough time for two reasons. First of all, they treated them like dirt. And they've said a lot of insulting things, calling government bureaucrats criminals, calling some mechanic who works on the radar system at the FAA a criminal or scum. You know, come on, that's a bit much, right? Secondly, most of the people who work for the federal government are highly skilled. They're science. They're not bureaucrats. They're not paper pushers. We don't do that anymore because we have computers to push our paper. Right. They're scientists. They're engineers. Right. They're. They're people with high skills. And guess what? They can get jobs outside the government. So there's been a real. There's going to be real lasting damage to the government from the way they did this. And it's analogous to the lasting damage that they're causing at universities where we now have top scientists who used to invent great cures for cancer and things like that, deciding to go find jobs in Europe because this culture has gotten so bad.
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Host
What happens to this agency now? Who's in charge of it?
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Elaine Kmark
Well, what that, what they've done is DOGE employees have been embedded in each of the organizations in the government. Okay. And they basically, and the president himself have said this. They basically report to the Cabinet secretaries or to the politically appointed head of the agency. So if you are, you know, if you're in the Transportation Department, right. You have to make sure that Sean Duffy, who's the Secretary of Transportation, agrees with you on what you want to do. And Sean Duffy has already had a great big public fight in the Oval Office during a cabinet meeting with Elon Musk, okay? So you know that he has not been thrilled with the advice he's gotten from Doge. So from now on, Doge is going to have to work hand in hand with Donald Trump's appointed leaders.
- [21:19]
Host
Who gets custody of Big Balls?
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Elaine Kmark
Let's see, I just read this someplace and I'm trying to remember. Big Balls is at. He has gotten a job somewhere and I can't remember which agency. But you know, that's, that's kind of the ridiculousness of this whole thing. And let me just say, by the way, a lot of these people, nobody knows who they are, okay? And now that they are embedded in the government, they're going to have to go through the regular security clearances that all government employees have to go through because everybody's special government employment is up. It's up in only 130 days. That's technically why Elon Musk left. Once you are no longer a special government employee, you have to go through security checks, background checks, et cetera. And who knows, we may find out that a lot of these people are people that the government would have never hired in the first place.
- [22:13]
Host
And you say, all told, Maybe they saved $175 billion, but probably not even that much, right?
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Elaine Kmark
Right, probably not even that much.
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Host
And just to bring this around to what we're here talking about now, they're in this huge fight over wasteful spending in the big beautiful so called bill. Does this just look like government as usual, ultimately?
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Elaine Kmark
Well, it's actually worse. Then it's actually worse than normal because a, the deficit impacts are bigger than normal, okay? It's adding more to the deficit than previous bills have done. And the second reason it's worse than normal is that everybody is still living in a fantasy world. And the fantasy world says that somehow we can deal with our deficits by cutting waste, fraud and abuse. That is pure nonsense. Let me say it. Pure nonsense. And the reason is where does most of the government money go? Does it go to some bureaucrats sitting on Pennsylvania Avenue? It goes to us. It goes to your grandmother in her Social Security and her Medicare. It goes to veterans and veterans benefits. It goes to Americans. That's why it's so hard to cut it. It's so hard to cut it because it's us and people are living on it. Now, there's a whole other topic that nobody talks about, and it's called entitlement reform. Right? Could we reform Social Security? Could we make the retirement age go from 67 to 68? That would save a lot of money. Could we change the cost of living? Nobody, nobody, nobody is talking about that. And that's because we are in this crazy, polarized environment where we can no longer have serious conversations about serious issues.
- [24:18]
Host
No disrespect to Elaine Kmark from Brookings, but we have totally talked about entitlement reform on this show.
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Elaine Kmark
Nobody. Nobody, Nobody.
- [24:26]
Host
Avishai Aartzi produced our episode today with an assist from Denise Guerra. Aminah Al Saadi edited Patrick Boyd mixed. Laura Bullard checked the facts for today, explained.