“Morning Joe” co-host Joe Scarborough gave kudos to Elon Musk on Wednesday, saying it was “good” the head of the Department of Government Efficiency spoke to reporters alongside President Donald Trump the day before.
“Elon Musk getting before reporters, I actually think, as much as possible — since his people are running through these government agencies — I think that is extraordinarily important,” Scarborough said.
The X owner and his DOGE team have been on a cost-cutting spree aimed at a number of government agencies in recent weeks. Musk said he is aiming to cut $1–$2 trillion in annual spending — a goal that represents up to 30% of what the government shelled out in 2024. To reach that goal, he has enlisted a small team of young engineers within DOGE, the new department President Trump put him in charge of.
Among the federal contracts being slashed by DOGE is the $8.2 million Politico has been paid for government subscriptions.
Scarborough on Wednesday said his “chief complaint” with DOGE had been the “lack of transparency” around it. But Musk answering questions from reporters inside the Oval Office earned praise from the veteran MSNBC anchor.
“I do think it’s good Elon Musk went before reporters and answered questions,” he said.
Although, not everyone on “Morning Joe” agreed.
“What happened yesterday was not transparency,” MSNBC analyst John Heilemann argued. “Elon Musk just taking questions from reporters — I’m for it, I’m for it. But that’s not a metric of transparency.”
Heilemann then said Musk made “dozens of totally unsupported claims to justify what he’s doing” and that it looked like he was “filibustering and making stuff up.”
Musk on Tuesday said the “high-level goal” of DOGE was to “restore democracy.” He told reporters — with his son X Æ A-Xii and President Trump nearby — that DOGE’s recent cuts to the federal bureaucracy were critical towards achieving this goal. Musk added the Trump Administration had a mandate from the people to trim the federal government, following his win in the 2024 election.
“If the people cannot vote and have their will be decided by their elected representatives — in the form of the president and the Senate and the House — then we don’t live in a democracy, we live in a bureaucracy,” he noted.
The Tuesday press conference, beyond what Trump and Musk had to say, gained attention because the Associated Press was barred from entering the Oval Office; AP Executive Editor Julie Pace said it was because the outlet had not started calling the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, after President Trump recently signed an executive order changing the gulf’s official government name.
And when a reporter asked how he would be “policing” himself against conflicts of interests — since Musk’s companies like Tesla and SpaceX have received government funding — here is what he had to say: “All of our actions are fully public. So if you see anything and say like, ‘Wait a second. Hey, Elon, that seems like maybe there’s a conflict there,’ it’s not like people are going to be shy about saying that. They’ll say it immediately.”
