“It’s not an optional thing. It is an essential thing.”

So said Elon Musk yesterday at the first cabinet meeting of Donald Trump’s second term — a cabinet meeting that will be remembered for the outsized role that a non-cabinet member, Musk, played in it as well as the remarkable transparency of the event itself.

After some brief remarks about the war in Ukraine and the need to bring it to an end, Trump called on HUD Secretary Scott Turner to deliver a prayer. Then he turned things over to the “unelected billionaire!” who’s “not even a cabinet member!”

Musk began by calling himself the president’s “humble tech support,” and he had the T-shirt to prove it. He talked about helping to fix the government’s computer systems, many of which, he said, are extremely old, don’t communicate, run on outdated software, and are riddled with mistakes. But that wasn’t what he came to talk about.

No, the essential thing Musk mentioned was deficit reduction. It’s never been a particularly sexy topic — trust us, we know — but Musk’s platform might help raise awareness.

“The overall goal here with the DOGE team,” he said, “is to help address the enormous deficit. We simply cannot sustain a country with $2 trillion [annual] deficits. The interest rate — just the interest on the national debt — now exceeds the Defense Department’s spending. We spend a lot on the Defense Department. Look, we’re spending over $1 trillion on interest. If this continues, the country will go, become de facto bankrupt. … That’s the reason I’m here.”

That’s why it has to be done
pic.twitter.com/QinG3c3DYa

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 27, 2025

After his monologue, Musk took questions from those around the table whose departmental budgets he and his DOGE team have sworn to cut — and not with a scalpel but with a chainsaw. Then he took questions among them about the “inhumanity” of having asked two million or so federal employees to tell us what they do to earn their taxpayer-funded paychecks. Musk did so on Saturday by asking for a list of “5 bullets of what you accomplished last week,” and he gave them until end of day Monday to respond.

The request caused a lot of consternation among a class of people not used to having to justify their existence. In retrospect, it could’ve been handled more tactfully — perhaps sent during the workweek, perhaps even after the cabinet meeting, after he or the president had given folks a heads-up. At this point, around a million people have yet to respond to it.

“I think that email perhaps was misinterpreted as a performance review,” Musk explained, “but actually it was a pulse-check review. Uh, do you have a pulse? Do you have a pulse and two neurons? If you have a pulse and two neurons, you can reply to an email. This is, I think, not a high bar.” Musk then listed three things DOGE wants to determine of everyone who’s on the public payroll: “Are they real, are they alive, and can they write an email?” Musk believes that there are people — perhaps many people — who are on the federal payroll but who aren’t even real. And he thinks this “pulse check” is a good way to ferret them out. He also said he plans to send out a follow-up email.

“I think it’s a good idea,” said Trump when asked about it. “You’ve got a lot of people that have not responded. So we’re trying to figure out: Do they exist? Who are they? And it’s possible that a lot of those people will be actually fired.”

The president continued: “This country has gotten bloated and fat and disgusting.”

He then defended Musk, joking that if any of his cabinet members were unhappy with Elon, he’d “throw them out of here.” He even signed another executive order — this one making DOGE official.

“They have a lot of respect for Elon and that he’s doing this. And some disagree a little bit. But I will tell you, for the most part, I think everyone’s not only happy — they’re thrilled.”

In all, the meeting was a show of transparency that would’ve been unimaginable during the previous four years. Think back on Joe Biden’s rare photo-op pressers with foreign dignitaries. Think about their brevity, and think about how his staff called it quits after a couple of minutes of scripted remarks and then created a commotion as they shooed the assembled media away, drowning them out in a cacophony meant to keep any good questions from making it to the enfeebled president’s ears and thereby eliciting a disastrous response and clean-up on Aisle 46.

Yesterday’s event was refreshingly different. And it was pure Trump.