President Trump’s statement on Friday that he had directed Elon Musk to turn his budget-slashing initiative on the Pentagon underscored Mr. Musk’s rapidly expanding role in their charge to shrink the federal bureaucracy and stomp out any opposition to the president’s agenda.
At a White House news conference, Mr. Trump said Mr. Musk would also be examining the Education Department. It is one more corner of the government, from the Treasury Department to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, now under the scrutiny of the band of young and inexperienced operatives under Mr. Musk’s direction.
In the first three weeks of the new administration, Mr. Musk’s cost-cutting team has swiftly inserted itself into at least 17 federal agencies, according to a tally by The New York Times.
Both the billionaire and Mr. Trump have defended the disruptive actions of his young aides, even as some of them have come under scrutiny for their past actions.
One Musk aide, Marko Elez, a 25-year-old former employee of X, resigned on Thursday after The Wall Street Journal revealed that he had made racist posts on X. On Friday, Mr. Musk called for the Journal reporter to be fired and said he was reinstating Mr. Elez, a move that both the president and vice president said they supported.
“We shouldn’t reward journalists who try to destroy people,” Vice President JD Vance posted on X.
Another young aide, Edward Coristine, was fired in June 2022 from an internship at Path Network, an Arizona-based data security company, after “an internal investigation into the leaking of proprietary company information that coincided with his tenure,” the company said in a statement Friday. Bloomberg first reported his firing.
Mr. Musk’s team suffered at least a temporary setback on Friday when a federal judge put on hold the effort to put much of the staff of the U.S. Agency for International Development on administrative leave and order home its overseas workers. And early Saturday a federal judge issued an emergency order to temporarily restrict the team’s access to the Treasury Department’s payment and data systems.
Neither Mr. Trump nor Mr. Musk has appeared to be deterred, though, by any of the initial legal constraints placed on them by the courts. Both seem intent on carrying through with a program of personnel purging and budget cutting that they have claimed could save billions or even trillions of dollars.
Asked at the news conference if there was anything in the federal government that Mr. Musk had been told not to touch with his cost-cutting effort, Mr. Trump replied: “Well, we haven’t discussed that much.” He added: “I guess maybe you could say some high intelligence or something. And I’ll do that myself if I have to.”
Members of Mr. Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency visited the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Friday, according to a person familiar with the matter. At least two members of Mr. Musk’s team — Nikhil Rajpal and Gavin Kliger — are now listed in the agency’s employee directory, the person said on condition of anonymity in the absence of authorization to speak publicly.
Sending Mr. Musk into the Pentagon, the department with the single biggest discretionary budget, creates a clear conflict of interest: The Defense Department has billions of dollars in contracts with Mr. Musk through SpaceX and other companies he owns.
The Defense Department relies on Mr. Musk to get most of its satellites into orbit and works closely with his companies on a variety of other initiatives. His companies were promised $3 billion across nearly 100 different contracts last year with 17 federal agencies.
Mr. Trump had said earlier that he would be mindful of any conflicts of interest posed by Mr. Musk’s vast business holdings. “If there’s a conflict,” Mr. Trump said this week, “then we won’t let him get near it.” But on Friday he expressed no such concern.
“I’ve instructed him to go check out Education, to check out the Pentagon, which is the military,” Mr. Trump said, referring to Mr. Musk, during a news conference with Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba of Japan.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth responded to the announcement on social media on Friday night, saying that he was looking forward to working with Mr. Musk. “Need to cut the fat (HQ) and grow the muscle (warfighters),” he wrote.
During the news conference earlier Friday, Mr. Trump praised Mr. Musk’s operation, saying that so far the office had identified massive amounts of waste and fraud. He pointed to large percentages of employees who had been “dismissed” at the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Mr. Trump said that he didn’t anticipate a purge of that scale at the Defense Department, “but you’ll find some things that are pretty bad.” And he indicated that he would not seek to rein in Mr. Musk’s operation. Mr. Trump that Mr. Musk would be going through “just about everything.”
He defended the actions of Mr. Musk’s team.
“I’m very proud of the job that this group of young people, generally young people, but very smart people, they’re doing,” the president said. “They’re doing it at my insistence. It would be a lot easier not to do it, but we have to take some of these things apart to find the corruption.”
Asked about a new Time magazine cover showing Mr. Musk behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump mocked the magazine but defended Mr. Musk.
“Elon is doing a tremendous job,” Mr. Trump said. “He’s wanted to be able to do this for a long time.”
Nicholas Nehamas, Kate Conger, Ryan Mac and Theodore Schleifer contributed reporting.
