“Morning Joe” co-host Joe Scarborough railed against President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s sweeping cuts to the federal bureaucracy on Wednesday morning, calling those moves “political negligence and malfeasance.”
“And, it’s hurting people,” he noted.
A moment earlier, Scarborough warned the cuts being implemented by Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) could lead to death and destruction.
“They’re going to take away and fire people in the FAA. So those plane crashes that you’re seeing — you’re going to see more of them,” Scarborough said.
He also warned the DOGE cuts could lead to a decrease “in food safety, in water safety [and] in air safety.”
“This is going to be the political equivalent of death by a thousand cuts, if they don’t do this in a more responsible way,” Scarborough added. He did not go into detail on how DOGE could be more responsible with said cuts.
Scarborough and the “Morning Joe” crew were responding to an interview President Trump and Musk did with Sean Hannity on Fox News the night before.
During the Tuesday interview, Musk said he is aiming to cut $1 trillion in annual government spending. That goal would represent about 15% of annual spending, after the federal government spent $6.75 trillion in 2024.
Musk and his DOGE team have taken aim at several bureaucratic organizations, including the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Department of Education, in recent weeks.
The X owner, during his joint interview with Trump on Tuesday night, said the DOGE cuts are helping reinforce democracy in the U.S.
“One of the biggest functions of the DOGE team is just making sure that the presidential executive orders are actually carried out,” Musk told Hannity. “I just want to point out this is a very important thing, because the president is the elected representative of the people. So he’s representing the will of the people. And if the bureaucracy is fighting the will of the people, and preventing the president from implementing what the people want, then what we live in is a bureaucracy and not a democracy.”
