Musk and DOGE: Inside 100 days of chaos, with WIRED’s Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond

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1:26I think that is probably true. Is doing it over an eight-week timeline with a machete the most effective way to get the change that you want? Probably not. You have people who have given over their entire careers to work for a given federal agency who are now getting marching orders from 21-year-old former SpaceX interns who have never worked for the government in their entire lives. But Doge is not going anywhere. Whether Elon Musk is spending more time sleeping on the factory floor at Tesla or not, right? Doge is already here. It is entrenched in the federal government. And that is not going anywhere, wherever Elon Musk is.

2:17That's Katie Drummond, Global Editorial Director of Wired, the tech and business news outlet. Wired has done incredible coverage of Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. DOGE's purported goal is to eliminate waste from the federal government. It's fired thousands of people, gutted agencies, generated a slew of controversy. I wanted to talk to Katie to better understand Musk's head-spinning activity, even as Musk himself claims to be trimming back his DOGE commitment. We discussed the evolving relationship between politics and business, the role of journalists and business leaders amid disruption, and more.

2:56If, like me, you've been a bit overwhelmed by the flurry of moves coming out of the White House, Katie offers valuable context for a chaotic time that shows no signs of slowing down. I'm Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

3:17I'm Bob Safian. I'm here with Katie Drummond, Wired's global editorial director and co-host of the terrific podcast Uncanny Valley. Katie, thanks for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. It's so nice to be here. So, you know, my producers got all over me to have you on the show because they love everything that Wired has been covering around Elon Musk and Trump's Department of Government Efficiency, Doge. And I'm eager to talk about that. But first, I have something I wanted to ask you about some recent media news that Trump's executive orders to cut funding from NPR and PBS. I mean, it's not a surprise at this point, but it's still kind of a big moment.

4:00It's not a surprise. I mean, he has obviously been signaling and messaging this in no uncertain terms for some time now, right? Which is that he just doesn't think these organizations should be funded by the government, doesn't seem to think they should exist. These are scary times for journalism. And I think that that executive order, you know, we can talk all day about how binding an executive order actually is or whether this executive order actually carries any water and allows him to do what he's trying to do here, which as far as I'm aware, it doesn't really. But to me, what's more important and often, unfortunately, what's more important with President Trump is not so much what he's actually able to do.

4:42It's what he signals he wants to do, right? It's about intention. It's about the message that he's putting out into the country, into the public sphere, out into the world that he doesn't think these journalistic entities should exist. Like, that is a very chilling message, whether you are a journalist or just someone who believes that journalism should be uninterfered with by government entities. If you think that, then this executive order should be very scary for you. From a journalist perspective, it's not so bad to separate media organizations from government funding, right? Like, in theory, journalists shouldn't be beholden to anyone.

5:20It's more the message that, like, any journalist who disagrees with him should be somehow penalized. Yeah. I mean, I always think about sort of what is the intention behind what he's doing. And sometimes it's very, frankly, very difficult to decipher what Trump's intentions are. But I think the idea is just to put journalists on notice that, you know, you do not have a fan in the White House. The reality with sort of government funding of journalistic entities is, one, you know, I do not think that NPR and PBS are beholden to the government in their coverage. They publish plenty of critical coverage of administrations, and they have for a very long time.

6:00But the idea of pulling funding from organizations like those that provide, you know, free access to media and to news and to entertainment for millions and millions of Americans is really disturbing. It's not like there's a bunch of cash lying around for these organizations to go get somewhere else. There is no cash. ultimately there is no tried and true business model unless you were smart enough to acquire Wordle several years ago and you're the New York Times. Like, so it's a scary prospect to think about the idea of government funding, you know, being pulled from organizations like PBS and NPR, which are really, really vital to dialogue in this country, in my opinion.

6:45Unless you're backed by a billionaire like Jeff Bezos, right? I mean, that's worked out so well for the Washington Post. What is happening there? I mean, all I can, like, there are so many talented journalists and editorial minds at the Washington Post, and every subscriber they lose is, you know, another drop in the hat that will ultimately add up to more layoffs for that organization unless he decides to sell, right? To divest himself of this asset that seems to be nothing but a burden on the rest of his businesses. I have no idea why he continues to operate this newspaper if it doesn't really seem like he wants to participate in that kind of rigorous editorial work or even dialogue on its opinion pages.

7:28Unless the reason you own it is because you want to support that kind of journalism as opposed to owning it because you think it's going to make money for you the way Amazon does. It's not that kind of a business, right? It's not that kind of a business. I wish him luck trying to steer the newsroom of The Washington Post in the direction that he wants. That is just not how journalism works. Well, so let's talk about Doge. You made a big journalistic commitment to cover Doge from the beginning. I mean, one article alone I saw had nine writers on it. Why Doge? What made you want to focus there? Was it because your reporters had covered Musk for years at Tesla and SpaceX?

8:05And so you had background that other newsrooms might not? Or was there another reason? So when I started here in late 2023, we did not have a politics team. We were not regularly in the business of covering politics. And that was something I decided to do very early on in my time was to hire a politics editor to staff up on reporters who could really own that intersection of politics and technology. I was not thinking about Elon Musk very much in the context of politics. I was thinking about politics and technology in the context of artificial intelligence, in the context of hacking, in the context of online influencers and how they were changing, you know, presidential campaigns or electoral campaigns around the world.

8:49Now, it just so happened that in the summer of 2024, right, we had our politics team, we were up and running. Trump was shot in the ear, grazed by a bullet. Elon Musk jumped in, you know, headfirst, endorsed Donald Trump, you know, started fundraising for him. Oh, this is about to be a big story. Elon Musk, like the most influential technologist and sort of technology CEO of our lifetimes, arguably, is jumping into politics. this game just changed in a really interesting way. And that's when we started pulling reporters, not just from the politics team, but from our business desk, right? From other teams that we have in our newsroom to really start to lean in and start to try to own this intersection of Trump and Musk, Trump and Musk, Trump and Musk.

9:39And then they announced the Department of Government Efficiency. Is this a joke? Like what, we're seriously naming a new part of government after a meme? Like, this is ridiculous what is happening. And then the coverage obviously spirals from there. The goal of Doge is purportedly to cut fraud and waste and abuse from the federal government, which seems like a good thing. Sure. How pure do you think Musk's intentions are? I mean, obviously, there are claims of, you know, other objectives. I never try to get inside Elon Musk's head. I think that sounds like a very dangerous place to spend time.

10:20and not necessarily a rational place to spend time. I think that one thing that's so interesting about him and the people who are working for Doge and this sort of ecosystem that they inhabit is that if you ask them, right, if you asked Elon Musk what his intentions are, I think that they think they are doing really good things. Like, I think that his intentions sort of at a superficial level are, no, like this is a wasteful, corrupt, fraudulent bureaucracy, and it needs to be disrupted in a very extreme and very aggressive way. I think that he genuinely thinks that, and I think that they see themselves as the good guys in this fight, right?

11:00But as we have seen Doge and Doge's actions play out, it's very obvious that there are other ideas here, right? There are other designs here on what exactly it means to overhaul, you know, every federal agency in the U.S. governmental apparatus. And a lot of that appears to have to do with data, right? And it has to do with artificial intelligence. So it's become very obvious that Doge is trying to amass as much data from within every federal agency as they possibly can, right? They want their hands on all kinds of sensitive data, data about Americans, data about people applying to be U.S. citizens.

11:39And they want that data to be accessible from one central place, right? So they want to be able to have the Department of Homeland Security access data from the IRS, right? They are really trying to create some kind of central resource of data about Americans and about non-US citizens. And obviously that data could be used for all kinds of things, including deportations. And then there is the AI piece of it all. And that to me, You know, the data piece of it to me really feels pernicious, scary, malevolent, right? Like that data is extremely sensitive. This is the most personal information we have about every single person living in this country.

12:25The AI piece of it now, you have Doge going into different agencies and trying to introduce artificial intelligence. So we published a story about a Doge recruiter trying to recruit Palantir alums to go build and deploy AI agents inside the federal government with specific language saying, we think there are about 70 ,000 jobs that could be automated with AI agents, which to be clear from my point of view and the point of view of the Wired Newsroom, AI agents are still very early in their development. There is no world in which AI agents should or could or can be deployed across federal agencies in an effective, error-free manner.

13:10But there appears to be this idea that what's more efficient than having no people working for the federal government, but just letting AI do it instead. Right. Well, and that vision is part of what is driving a lot of tech businesses thinking it'll happen down the road. What you're saying is the state of the technology right now is not at a place where it can effectively do that. Not even close. I mean, AI agents, we came into this year at Wired thinking, okay, this will be a year where a lot of really interesting work happens around agentic AI, right? Around this idea of AI that can actually perform like end-to-end tasks for you independently without you having to be, you know, closely involved.

13:52That is still very, very early in its development. And the idea that, you know, even for private businesses, that they would start deploying those tools. It's very early to be having those conversations, let alone saying, let's see how this does with, you know, the very sensitive tasks of various federal agencies. It is absolutely ridiculous to even suggest that that's a viable idea. So I want to ask about data. It's become a staple of business, of technology businesses, certainly, that sort of aligning data across different parts of an organization is tremendously valuable. If Doge is merging data from across government agencies, why is that risky in a different way than what Google is already doing?

14:40Sure. Well, I mean, first of all, I would say, yes, it is very common outside of the government for companies to collect all kinds of data, including data on users, to put that all in one place. That's not necessarily a good thing. It is something that happens. It often happens so that they can serve, you know, more effective advertising to different users. There are all kinds, of course, of horror stories about that data leaking or sort of that data being used in ways that users of these services would certainly prefer that the data was not. When it comes to federal agencies, I think what's particularly, like ridiculous or wild to me is like, as if no one ever thought of this before, right?

15:19The data that is held by different federal agencies is compartmentalized and contained within those agencies for a reason. It's not like a bunch of idiots have been running these agencies for decades and they just didn't think that maybe they could all compare notes, right? They hold that data in compartmentalized ways because, for example, they want, and, And, you know, undocumented immigrants are actually encouraged to file taxes because it could help them potentially down the road apply for and obtain U.S. citizenship, right? That data cannot then be shared with other federal agencies who are looking to deport people.

15:58Like that is one very specific example of why it's important for this data to be siloed, not for all of this data to be aggregated and put in one place. I would also say that, you know, the more data from across all of these agencies you compile and you aggregate, the more specific and holistic and well-rounded a picture you're able to get of any given individual living in this country. The U.S. government doesn't want to serve ads to us. This is not meta. We're not talking about Facebook, right? You don't want, you know, one person within the federal government to have access to every single bit of information about you from across every single agency of government.

16:42That is a very dangerous proposition, and that effectively is a very effective way to build a very powerful surveillance state. Another area of concern on Doge is the sort of potential conflict of interest for Musk and other Doge employees who still hold positions at private companies, including ones with active government contracts. The Trump administration doesn't really seem to care about that. Well, the Trump administration loves a conflict of interest. I mean, this is sort of their whole deal. I mean, if you look at even just the Trump family and their entanglements with crypto, as the New York Times reported, I mean, Donald Trump himself is awash with conflicts of interest, and that seems to be how he wants to run his administration.

17:27Obviously, when it comes to Elon Musk himself, again, just one giant conflict of interest. I mean, SpaceX, okay? SpaceX is regulated by the FAA. Elon Musk and Doge now have operatives, workers, inside the FAA, helping decide how the FAA should be run, helping to decide which contracts to cancel, which contracts to uphold, how to move forward with that agency, with aviation safety, with everything that the FAA oversees. You know, SpaceX is a massive beneficiary of government contracts. And SpaceX is regulated by those same agencies. You know, all of those agencies are now, you know, beholden to some extent to Doge and to Musk and to an administration at the end of the day, to an administration that supports the work that those individuals are doing.

18:19You are not shy about expressing your concerns about the Trump administration. And I'm curious, do you think of yourself as being part of the resistance? There's that phrase that's used sometimes. Like how much do you worry about political repercussions of Wired's coverage for you, for Wired's business? I am not an activist. I am not part of a hashtag resistance movement. I am a journalist. Wired, our newsroom, we go out, we seek out information, we call sources, we get expert opinions. We're able to sort of synthesize that information and help our audience understand what it means, what the potential benefits are, often in the case of Doge, what the potential risks are.

19:02That information is reviewed by lawyers and fact checkers. It is then published, right? So I am in the business of providing our audience information, but I think it would be ridiculous to say, well, I'm just providing the information. You come to your own conclusions. No, I have a point of view on all of this and so does Wired. As a newsroom, we have an institutional point of view about what's happening right now. And we are very well positioned to have that point of view. We employ subject matter experts on AI. We employ subject matter experts on data and how data is stored and safeguarded and what the potential risks are of, you know, pulling disparate data sources together into one place.

19:39We have experts in politics and policy and how federal agencies ought to best be run. And when we don't have expertise on staff, we outsource it, right? We call experts. That is the job of journalism. So, you know, I'm not shy about sharing my point of view, particularly because I don't think this is a great time in history to be shy. Whatever your role, if you're a journalist, you're an academic, whatever your profession, whatever your walk of life, I think it's important to use your platform and use your expertise to say something about what is happening right now. I think I would really regret in 50 years on my deathbed, you know, looking at my grandchildren and them asking me what I did during the Trump administration and me telling them, oh, I just kept my head down and I stayed really, really quiet.

20:24Now, in terms of safety, I mean, look, you would be crazy to work in journalism right now and not be concerned about your safety. It's something that we we talk about a lot internally. We talk about it a lot at Wired, at Condé Nast, my parent company. Obviously, I can't speak for them. What I can say is that they have been incredibly supportive of this work. And it's something that we are taking one day at a time, but with ultimately a commitment to continuing to do this work for as long as we possibly can, whether I'm doing the work from New York or from a bunker in Europe, TBD, but I will be doing the work from somewhere.

21:01Katie's emphasis on covering the intersection of politics and technology was spot on. And her insights about the risks from even well-meaning efforts by Trump and his cohort are bracing. So how should businesses react? And how will Doge impact Musk's own long-term business reputation at Tesla and beyond? We talk about that and more after the break. Stay with us.

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23:04So if you're scaling, make it simple with Deal. Go to deel.com slash MOS and get up to three months free. Before the break, Wired's Katie Drummond explained what Musk's Department of Government Efficiency is after and some of the risks involved. Now we talk about Doge's emerging impact on Musk's private businesses, whether he's really likely to step away from his government work and more. Let's jump back in.

23:37One of the intriguing elements of Doge has been the sort of limited checks and balances in restraining Musk's efforts? I mean, we've seen some legal cases, but the Trump administration hasn't been shy about rejecting certain court orders. There's been muted congressional response. Is Doge potentially part of a constitutional crisis? Well, I mean, I think that there's no question about the very real potential for that to be the case, right? I mean, anytime a judge says, do this or don't do this, And the Trump administration waves its hands around and says, yeah, no, we're not going to we're not going to listen.

24:19Like that is a we we are in a constitutional crisis. Like that is what that looks like when the rule of law is not the rule. We have a serious problem on our hands. Obviously, there has been a great deal of litigation. I mean, more more than frankly, we can even keep up with. And I think then then most journalists can. I mean, sometimes we'll find a legal filing and it's like a week old and nobody's published a story about it. and it's newsworthy, right? I mean, there is so much happening right now, but there is no question that a lot of what Doge appears to be doing is not to the letter of the law.

24:54It is being challenged in court, and we will have to wait and see as more of these cases wind their way through the courts and end up with a judge making a decision whether or not the administration decides to abide those decisions, obviously, we have already seen very real examples of the administration deciding not to. And that is a very scary situation, of course, for this country to be in. It seems like Musk himself has been surprised by how much his reputation has taken a hit since Doge. You know, we've seen protests against Tesla and setting fire to cars and dealerships and the stock price down and revenue down.

25:35Do you think Musk regrets at all getting involved in this? I don't know that he's someone who lives with a lot of regret. I think that what's so interesting about his surprise and his sort of, you can see when he talks about it in press appearances, he is very sad. He is saddened by the sort of acts of violence against Tesla cars or the impact this is having on his companies. And he is very surprised at the fact that not everybody is thrilled by the idea of slashing one to two trillion dollars from the federal bureaucracy. I think that what that speaks to ultimately is what I said earlier, which is that he thinks that he is the good guy here.

26:16So if you think that what you are doing is really smart, is really strategic, is really just like a revolutionary thing in a positive way to be doing within the federal government, wouldn't you be shocked when thousands or millions of people come out and say, actually, we hate your guts for this? I mean, that would be shocking. I mean, we're not close to the$2 trillion savings target. Oh, well, I mean, he walked that back. Then it was$1 trillion, and I think we're, you know, at a fraction, a fraction of that, if even. But the goal is to sort of chip away at the core infrastructure of the federal government, right?

26:58Because there's kind of this assumption. I mean, I understand sort of the idea of there being waste and the government could be faster, but there is this sort of feeling, as you mentioned, these words like fraud, you know, that people are doing this on purpose, are being somehow stealing government money by working there and not doing their jobs. Is it true that the federal government is bloated, can be inefficient, that we could probably take a lot of money out of the federal government? Is that true? Like, yes, I think that is probably true. Is doing it over an eight-week timeline with a machete the most effective way to get the change that you want?