The following is a lightly edited transcript of the March 14 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
We suddenly have a lot of bad news for Elon Musk on our hands. A striking new federal court ruling just ordered the Trump administration to reinstate thousands of federal workers and their jobs, a big blow to Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Meanwhile, two new polls show approval of Musk absolutely cratering—and critically, the polls show large majorities have turned against Musk’s core mission of gutting the government. So what if the public mobilization against Musk and Tesla is really working? Today, we’re talking about this question with Paul Waldman, who has a good new piece on his Substack, The Cross Section, arguing that the public campaign against Tesla is actually good for our country. Great to have you back on, Paul.
Paul Waldman: Thanks.
Sargent: A federal district judge in California just ruled that the Trump administration must reinstate thousands of workers across six federal agencies, finding that their terminations were done improperly. This impacts Treasury, Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, Defense, Energy, and Interior Departments. The key thing about the ruling is that the judge found that the firings were in bad faith. The cover story was that this was poor performance by all these workers. The judge slammed this as a sham. This is exactly what the municipal unions bringing the lawsuit argued; it’s a sham. Paul, this really goes to the impudence, the audacity of these firings. Your thoughts on it?
Waldman: Yeah. It does harken back to what happened in Trump’s first term, where one characteristic of a lot of the court cases where Trump’s moves got struck down was that over and over, judges up to and including the Supreme Court told the Trump administration that they were being sloppy and dishonest in their court filings and the way they went about things. This is what happened in the case when they tried to add a citizenship question to the U.S. census—the Supreme Court basically said, You’re being dishonest about what the purpose of this was. And we saw that in this ruling too.
The Office of Personnel Management basically told these agencies to fire all these workers, and to do it with the phony rationale that it was because of their performance. Then they got into court, and the Trump administration said, Well, the Office of Personnel Management wasn’t actually ordering it, they were just giving advice to the agencies and the agencies did it. And they said that the acting director of the OPM could not come in for cross-examination, even though he signed a statement that said that this is what was actually going on. The judge basically told them that they were lying to him. One thing that’s characteristic of courts, whether you’re talking about Republican appointee judges or Democratic appointee judges, is that they really don’t like it when the parties involved come in and lie to them—so you could tell how angry this judge was.
Sargent: This gets at a broader thing, which is this constant bad faith effort to shift around who’s doing what. First, Musk is in charge of these firings, Trump himself tells us. Then when they figure out that that just might be unconstitutional, they say, Oh, he’s advisory, he’s not running DOGE. And they constantly contradict each other on these questions of who’s doing the firing at even these lower levels, right?
Waldman: And in some cases, it’s just that they’re impatient, that they could get rid of lot of these employees if they do what’s called a Reduction in Force, where you eliminate positions. There’s a whole process involved—and the people whose positions are being eliminated may have the opportunity to get different jobs in the government, but there is a law that governs how that’s to take place. There were lot of reductions in force when the Clinton administration did its whole reinventing government thing, but it’s just not good enough for them. They want to do it fast. They want to have the “move fast and break things” and shock and awe [effects], and it goes along with vilifying the federal workforce. I think that that’s one of the things that I hope is coming out of this, even if hundreds of thousands of people whose jobs can’t be saved and it is a tragedy: that the American people are getting an education in all the different things that government does.
Republicans want to convince people that it’s this clichéd version of what a federal worker is, that it’s just some pencil pushing person. Trump said just the other day when he was asked about the firings that these people are not even coming to work. And I think that people are beginning to get an understanding that when you talk about federal workers, you’re talking about a nurse who works in a V.A. hospital, a scientist who works for the Department of Agriculture trying to help farmers maximize their crop yields, meteorologists who work at NOAA. These are people who actually are doing important work. A lot of what the P.R. aspect of what they’re doing is to try to say that these people don’t matter, that they’re incompetent, and that it’s okay to just fire them en masse.
Sargent: Exactly. Speaking of the public getting educated about this, we have two new polls to talk about. The new Quinnipiac poll finds that only 36 percent of voters approve of how Musk and DOGE are dealing with federal workers, 60 percent disapprove; 57 percent view Musk unfavorably, 54 percent say Musk and DOGE are hurting the country. Meanwhile, the new CNN poll finds that only 35 percent view Musk positively; 62 percent say the cuts to government are going too far, while only 37 percent say the cuts don’t go far enough in eliminating waste and fraud. Paul, CNN even used the bullshit “cutting waste and fraud” language, and they only got a small minority in support of that. Would you have expected this?
Waldman: Maybe not, but I think the lesson is that it harkens back to an old political science finding that people are ideological conservatives but operational liberals. What that means is that in the abstract, if you ask them, “Do you think government should be smaller?” most people will say yes. But when you get to the things that government actually does, it turns out they want the government to do more of everything. So what happens in a situation like this is people are getting an extended look at what the government does.
It’s one thing for Musk to come in and say, We’re going to find all this inefficiency and waste, fraud, and abuse, and that sounds good. But then when people actually see what’s happening and the services that are being withdrawn, and people start hearing, Well, maybe there’s not going to be anybody clean the bathrooms at national parks, and all the details start to come out over an extended period, which is what we have now, all of a sudden, people say, Wait, maybe this isn’t so great after all, and I don’t want these cuts to happen.
Sargent: I want to highlight another number from the CNN poll that really confirms what you’re saying and adds a dimension to it. Fifty-five percent say Trump’s cuts to federal programs will do economic harm. This is welcome news. The whole cover story for these types of cuts is always, in addition to what you said that federal workers are vermin and that should be stamped out en masse or whatever, cutting government will allow the economy to roar forth. People like you and me really struggle to get across the idea that cutting government hurts the economy. So I’ve got to think having a thoroughly repulsive figure like Musk hacking away at the government with a machete has got a hidden upside. It’s persuading people to like the government—and also with Trump fucking up the economy so visibly, maybe people are starting to realize that cutting government is bad economically as well. What do you think?
Waldman: Yeah. I think the circumstance and the confluence of a couple of different factors enables that argument to resonate with people because there is so much uncertainty right now. I’ll bet you that six months ago, if you took a poll and asked people how tariffs work, a lot of them would have said, because they heard Donald Trump say it, that other countries pay the tariffs. They don’t think that anymore. They’ve been exposed to a bunch of news about it; there’s been lots of media coverage about how the tariffs are hurting the American economy and will hurt the American economy if they go into full force. You have things like the price of eggs going up, and then you have these stories of all these job losses. I think that’s beginning to register with people that this is at a volume that really could affect the economy.
If you throw 200,000 government workers out of their jobs, people [will see] that in their own communities. It turns out that these workers are distributed all over the country, and people are seeing people that they know lose their jobs or have their jobs threatened. All of these economic stories are all coming together; and if you’re even marginally attentive to the news, you’re seeing lots and lots of stories about how uncertain everything is and people’s worries about the economy and risks that we could be plunging into a recession. All of a sudden, it doesn’t sound so much like kicking a bunch of people who work for the government out of work is a great idea. So it’s that confluence of factors and the timing that is making that make more sense to people.
Sargent: Yeah. And a lot of this has to do with the hubris of Musk and Trump as well. They figure that their magical propaganda powers can roll over anything in their path, and all of a sudden, real live events are actually persuading people otherwise. I want to talk about your piece. You wrote about the boycotting of Tesla, and you got into how all these far-right figures like Sean Hannity and also some dude who occupies the Oval Office have now gone out and endorsed Tesla, instructing the MAGA masses to love it. This is creating a new culture war that puts Trump and Republicans in the awkward position of saying that Teslas are awesome while they do everything possible to roll back former President Biden’s policies facilitating the transition to electric vehicles. Can you talk about that a bit?
Waldman: [The boycott] was already happening, but I think that Trump is only accelerating it. You’re seeing these protests outside of Tesla dealerships—in some cases even vandalism and people painting graffiti on the side of Teslas, especially the universally despised Cybertruck. Then what happens is the president and people like Sean Hannity decide, We have to come to Elon Musk’s defense. So Sean Hannity goes on his program and says he’s buying a Tesla and it’s a fantastic car.
That is only going to polarize Tesla as a vessel of identity. It’s important to understand that that’s what cars are already. All of the consumer goods that we buy say something about us, and that’s the way they’re marketed to us—that if you buy this, this is what kind of person you can be. That’s true of cars more so than any other consumer product. It’s always about who you are: who you are if you buy a Prius or if you buy a Ford F-150. And what they are now convincing people of, even more than they were before, is that if you buy a Tesla, maybe that means you’refa right-wing jerk. This is also happening in this difficult policy context where as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, there is up to a $7,500 tax credit for buying an E.V., and we don’t know yet whether that’s going to survive.
Now you would think that would be in Elon Musk’s interest to keep that tax credit there because a lot of people use it when they buy Teslas, and you would think he would tell Trump, Make sure that we don’t let Congress take away that tax credit. But Musk has said that he thinks that if the tax credit disappears, it’ll hurt his competitors more than it’ll hurt him—that people will still buy Teslas, but they won’t buy electric cars that are made by Ford and GM and Hyundai, etc. So this is a big unanswered question. We don’t know what’s going to happen to that tax credit. What we do know is that everything the Trump administration is doing is an attempt to dismantle every single climate-related policy that the Biden administration passed, and this was one of the biggest.
We just saw how Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator, now says he’s going to claw back $20 billion in funding that was supposed to go for community green projects like upgrading homes and businesses to be more energy efficient and things like that. We don’t know how that’s going to turn out, whether he can legally do that, but they’re trying to. They’re trying to kill anything that has the word “climate” in it, and this may be one of the casualties too. But even though taking away that tax credit could definitely hurt E.V. sales, the trajectory is still upward for E.V. adoption. That’s not something Trump is going to be able to stop.
Sargent: Absolutely not. He really won’t be able to, and he really wants to as well. Let’s talk about the ruling a little more. It’s not a guarantee of good news long-term. There is still a pretty good chance that a fair amount of these workers could lose their jobs. Do you want to talk about that element of it?
Waldman: Yeah. This judge said that the way that they went about firing all these people was basically fraudulent, that they sent them all letters and said, We’re firing you because of poor performance. In fact, for almost all of them, their performance was good and they have the documentation to prove it. So that was on false pretenses. Even if they’re going to be rehired, however, the Trump administration can probably still get rid of a great many of them.
They’re going after probationary employees precisely because they do not have as many civil service protections as people who are not probationary. Now, what that means is that usually that you’ve been in your job for less than a year, but it also applies to people who have gotten promoted and are in the first year after a promotion. So they may have worked for the federal government for 20 years, but they just got a promotion and now they’re probationary again for another year and they don’t have as many protections and they could be fired.
The administration is already planning to do widespread Reductions in Force, which allow them to eliminate entire positions. It’s a little more cumbersome bureaucratically to do that. There are rules they have to follow, and they may have to give a lot of those employees the opportunity to apply for other jobs, and there’s an appeals process. It just can’t be as quick, but it’s probably going to allow them to eliminate a lot of those positions and in the end achieve something like the same number of job cuts from the federal government that they’re trying to do all in one fell swoop.
Sargent: Right. Although it’s going to take them a long time to get this done. A lot of this is going to face litigation. Anything that slows these guys down is a positive. I want to point to another positive thing about the ruling. One of the core questions right now is whether Musk and Trump can successfully usurp entirely Congress’s role in allocating government funding for the federal workforce. Now, obviously, as you’re pointing out, the executive branch and agency heads do have some say over the makeup of their workforces, but the control is not unlimited; Congress has circumscribed it. That, to me, is what the ruling confirms. Like you say, we don’t know what’s going to happen in the long run, but it’s important to have these principles reaffirmed, isn’t it? It’s really a blow to them in some fundamental sense that they have to now talk their way or argue their way around these court rulings that are affirming some bedrock principles of the republic.
Waldman: And in a lot of these cases, what this all comes down to is: Do they have to obey the law or not? And what the administration is saying over and over again is, No, we really don’t. We can just decide that we don’t like that law. They’re trying to do that with impoundment so that they can just not spend money that Congress has appropriated; they’re trying to do that even on things like birthright citizenship, which could not be clear in the Constitution. Trump is asking the Supreme Court to just say that, Yeah, if you want to disobey the Constitution, you can. So we see that in one after another of these court cases, the grounds on which they’re being struck down is that there’s a law there that says how you’re supposed to go about this if you want to do this, and you’re not following it. But to the administration, to obey the law is something for the little people—and that’s certainly the animating spirit of Elon Musk and DOGE and Trump himself, that, Sure, these things are written into statute or written into the Constitution.
One of the interesting things that is different this time around…. What we saw in Trump’s first term was that a lot of the time there would be some White House counsel or some other counsel who at various key points would say, You can’t do that, it’s against the law, and then they wouldn’t actually get to do the thing that Trump wanted to do. Those lawyers have all been replaced with yes men who no matter what Trump proposes are going to say, Sure, let’s go for it. And the tragic part is, in a lot of cases that may work. Even if they don’t end up prevailing before the Supreme Court, they can create all kinds of damage that it’s going to take years to undo.
For instance, they’ve essentially shut down the USAID right now. It could be—there are court cases about this—that eventually the Supreme Court says to them, You can’t do this. You can’t just cancel all these contracts and fire all these people and dismantle this agency. You have to reinstate all of it. But by the time that ruling comes down, it may be too late. All those workers could have gone off and found other jobs and the programs that are taking place overseas can’t be rebuilt because health clinics have shut down. That may be what they’re counting on—that even if they lose in court, by the time it gets settled, they will have done so much damage that rebuilding it will take forever.
Sargent: And damage is their goal. We should be clear: They’re trying to basically destroy the U.S. state. I do want to stress, though, that what you’re getting at really underscores why it’s important to have all this polling showing that large majorities think Trump and Musk are overstepping their roles. It’s not just that the public isn’t buying the idea that government is bad and should be swept away in massive fashion, though that is good. It’s also that the public is getting a crash course in how our system works and why we should care about Congress’s powers vis-a-vis the president. To end on an optimistic note, this confluence, as you put it, has some heartening elements here. It’s really not that easy for Trump and Musk to get their way here. They have a tremendous amount of power, they’re trying to do a tremendous amount of damage, but they’re also running into tremendous resistance.
Waldman: Yeah, I think that could have both short- and long-term benefits. One of the things we know about Trump is that when he sees political danger, he pulls back. I don’t know how personally committed he is to Musk’s project—and at the point where it looks to Trimp like it’s really hurting him politically, he’ll rein it in. We’ve seen that many times. So political organizing and people turning against it may have the effect of mitigating some of the damage. Then in the long term, if it shows people how important government is, when the time comes where Democrats have to try to rebuild from all this destruction, it’s going to be important to be able to show people why it’s important and have them say, Yeah, we want those agencies rebuilt. We want the education department to come back into doing what it was doing. We need people who are going to run for office and say that they will engage in that project and make government actually do what it’s supposed to do to help people, and not just be this smoldering pile of ash.
Sargent: One hundred percent. Beautifully said. Paul Waldman, it’s always great to talk to you, man. Thanks for coming on.
Waldman: Thanks a lot, Greg.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.
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