WASHINGTON — Marco Rubio was incensed. Here he was in the Cabinet Room of the White House, the secretary of state, seated beside the president and listening to a litany of attacks from the richest man in the world.
Seated diagonally opposite, across the elliptical mahogany table, Elon Musk was letting Rubio have it, accusing him of failing to slash his staff.
You have fired “nobody,” Musk told Rubio, then scornfully added that perhaps the only person he had fired was a staff member from Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
Rubio had been privately furious with Musk for weeks, ever since his team effectively shuttered an entire agency that was supposedly under Rubio’s control: the U.S. Agency for International Development. But, in the extraordinary Cabinet meeting in front of President Donald Trump and around 20 others — details of which have not been reported before — Rubio got his grievances off his chest.
Musk was not being truthful, Rubio said. What about the more than 1,500 State Department officials who took early retirement in buyouts? Didn’t they count as layoffs? He asked, sarcastically, whether Musk wanted him to rehire all those people just so he could make a show of firing them again. Then he laid out his detailed plans for reorganizing the State Department.
Musk was unimpressed. He told Rubio he was “good on TV,” with the clear subtext being that he was not good for much else. Throughout all of this, the president sat back in his chair, arms folded, as if he were watching a tennis match.
After the argument dragged on for an uncomfortable time, Trump finally intervened to defend Rubio as doing a “great job.” Rubio has a lot to deal with, the president said. He is very busy, he is always traveling and on TV, and he has an agency to run. So everyone just needs to work together.
The meeting was a potential turning point after the frenetic first weeks of Trump’s second term. It yielded the first significant indication that Trump is willing to put some limits on Musk, whose efforts have become the subject of several lawsuits and prompted concerns from Republican lawmakers, some of whom have complained directly to the president.