'Ruthless cuts': Trump ripped for 'complete betrayal' of his base

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has been the public face of the Trump administration’s effort to dismantle many government agencies and slash the size of the federal workforce. On Wednesday, he attended Trump’s first Cabinet meeting, although he is not a Cabinet member. Meanwhile, Russell Vought, the Project 2025 mastermind and director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, has been working behind the scenes to enact far-right policies aimed at privatizing public resources like Medicaid and Social Security. We speak with Jacobin staff writer Branko Marcetic to discuss the radical DOGE agenda. “As they make these ruthless, ruthless cuts to the programs that people rely on, … they also want to keep in place massive tax cuts for the rich,” he says.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

President Trump held his first Cabinet meeting Wednesday. In an unusual [move,] the first official to address the meeting after the president was not a member of the Cabinet, but Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who’s been the public face of the administration’s effort to dismantle many government agencies and slash the size of the federal workforce. This is Trump introducing Musk Wednesday.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: So, I’d like to have Elon Musk, please, say a few words.

ELON MUSK: OK.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Thank you, Elon.

ELON MUSK: Thank you, Mr. President. Well, I’ll actually just call myself humble tech support here, because this is actually, as crazy as it sounds, that — that is almost a literal description of the work that the DOGE is doing, is helping fix the government computer systems.

AMY GOODMAN: Elon Musk went on to claim DOGE is aiming to slash a trillion dollars in spending. During the meeting, he spoke three times as long as any member of Trump’s Cabinet.

Some Cabinet members didn’t make any public remarks. This includes Budget Director Russell Vought, who’s seen by many as the architect behind Trump’s radical moves to reshape the federal government. Vought served in the same role as head of the Office of Management and Budget in the first Trump administration, then went on to author the right-wing Project 2025 playbook.

This is a clip of Vought during a 2023 speech he gave during a private gathering at the pro-Trump think tank Center for Renewing America. The video was obtained by ProPublica and Documented. And here, Vought’s outlining his goal of defunding federal bureaucracies.

RUSSELL VOUGHT: We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. We want — when they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are so — they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down, so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry, because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by Branko Marcetic. He’s a Jacobin staff writer, where his recent piece is headlined “Russell Vought Wants to Burn the Government Down.”

Branko, welcome back to Democracy Now! First respond overall to this highly unusual Cabinet meeting, and then talk about the role of Russell Vought, who we don’t usually see in front of the cameras, but who has played such a key role behind the scenes.

BRANKO MARCETIC: I mean, I think the Cabinet meeting shows the tenor and direction of the Trump administration, which, you know, Trump had campaigned on kind of fighting for the forgotten American, for fighting for the working class. You know, he said that he was going to fight Washington corruption. And then, before he had even been inaugurated, we saw him basically handing over the reins of government not just to Elon Musk, but a whole host of billionaires. Now, of course, you have 13 billionaires in Cabinet positions running the government. You know, it’s a complete betrayal, I think, of the people who voted for Trump in the vain hope that he was actually going to solve some of the problems that were bedeviling them, and, you know, really, really gives to lie to this entire rhetoric that we’ve heard for the last few years.

You know, with Vought, I think it’s interesting, because Musk gets all the attention, and deservedly so, but in many ways, you know, I liken Musk to kind of the private contractor or the consulting firm that’s brought in to basically do the dirty work of the people in management. And that’s Russell Vought.

Vought’s normally known as the Project 2025 guy. He’s known as a Christian nationalist, a hardcore social conservative. All of that is true, but I think the more important thing about Vought is kind of his entire career’s history. And, you know, he’s a guy who — most accurate way to describe it, he is an anti-government radical. He is someone who sees government as the biggest problem in people’s lives. He sees everything that has been done, basically since the Great Depression and the creation of the New Deal state, that has lifted people out of poverty, that has made it so that people aren’t being preyed on and poisoned and otherwise hurt by greed, by corporate greed — he sees all of that as a tremendous, profound mistake that needs to be reversed. And that has been his life’s goal.

You know, he sees Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security — he thinks these programs should be eliminated or privatized. He has actually spoken to Heritage, the Heritage Foundation. He said, you know, “I may not be into cutting Social Security and Medicare right now, but that’s purely a strategic decision on my part. We want to basically start with the cuts that Americans will feel the least, things like foreign aid, and then eventually we will build up to the point when we can really take on these programs.” You know, Vought is such a disbeliever in the importance of government in people’s lives that he thinks even the construction and repair of roads and highways is illegitimate and dangerous for the government to do.

And so, this is really very much what’s driving, I think, what we’re seeing from DOGE and a lot of these attempts to just completely dismantle the federal government. It’s part of a long-standing political agenda of this man that I think does not line up with what the U.S. public wants. I think it doesn’t really line up with a lot of what even Trump voters in this last election want.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk, Branko, about the memo that was distributed on Wednesday, that — if you can continue to say “shocked” so many — that directs agencies to submit their reduction-in-force plans by March 13th. It’s not just about laying off employees. And also, I mean, the bigger picture is, the amount of money that goes — that the federal budget goes to federal workers is tiny, if you’re talking about saving money, the fact that they’re focusing completely there, on these two-, what, point-three million federal workers, who are in so much agony right now. Tell us about the memo.

BRANKO MARCETIC: I mean, that shows you, you know, the entire game. It’s not really about saving money. Spending cuts and the deficit have been used by Vought — not just Vought, many, many right-wing voices over the years — as excuses to try and basically dismantle the modern administrative state. That’s what they want to do. That’s what Vought has been pretty open about wanting to do. And so, using the deficit is just an excuse.

Vought’s budgets, that he made both when he was serving in the House and also now, when he was heading the Center for Renewing America, at the same time as they make these ruthless, ruthless cuts to the programs that people rely on, and call for the mass firing of federal workers, they also want to keep in place massive tax cuts for the rich that Trump passed. And this was the same thing back in the 2000s, when Vought’s mock budgets kept in place Bush’s tax cuts.

So, the idea here behind that memo is to start dismantling and make these agencies basically dysfunctional, because that in itself is going to help create the groundwork for further dismantling and possible privatization in the future. If government becomes dysfunctional, if it seems to not work, if it doesn’t seem like it’s actually serving the interests of people, then you can kind of come through and say, “Well, look at that. The fact is, government doesn’t work. We should just sell this off to private corporations and let them do it.” That’s what Vought has wanted to do with the Postal Service, for instance, for many years. There was reporting also that they’re going to be starting to slash workers from the Social Security Administration. To me, I think that’s clearly an attempt, by stealth, to start to undermine Social Security. They can say, “Well, we’re not going to cut it now. We’re going to do as Trump is saying and leave it alone.” But what they’re basically aiming to do is to make the Social Security program function badly, so that down the line, a few years from now, when JD Vance is president or whoever else, they can say, “Well, look. Look how bad this is working, now that we’ve fired all these people. This should just be privatized, as we wanted to do 20 years ago.”

AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, if you’re talking about privatizing the Postal Service or Trump taking over the U.S. Postal Service, that also has a great impact on voting.

But I want to ask you about The Washington Postreporting the Federal Aviation Administration is close to canceling a $2.4 billion contract with Verizon and awarding the work to Elon Musk’s Starlink. The contract is for work to overhaul a key communications system and nation’s air traffic control system. Meanwhile, a separate investigation by The Washington Post has revealed Musk has built his business empire on $38 billion in federal funding via government contracts, loans, subsidies and tax credits over the past two decades. And the Post reports the total number might be even higher, because it’s not known how much Musk companies has received in classified work for the Pentagon and other agencies. Not to mention he pushed out the head of the FAA — right? — in charge of aviation. We’ve had one accident after another. He pushed him out because he didn’t like he would be fined and also was raising questions about his rockets bursting in air over places like Turks and Caicos. Branko?

BRANKO MARCETIC: I mean, it’s — I don’t know what other word you can use for this other than “corruption.” You know, Washington has long been a place where donors end up getting a tremendous amount of say over government policy, where they are able to use that to push their own business interests. Both parties do it. Frustration with that, I think, is one of the reasons why Trump won in 2016 and why he continues to have appeal with people, when he says he’s going to take on the swamp and Washington corruption.

And yet here we have the Trump administration engaging in the exact same kind of corruption and swamp-like behavior that it claims to be fighting, except on overdrive. I mean, I don’t think that we have ever seen anything quite this naked before, where the world’s richest man gives a campaign, what, $280 million, and then is basically just appointed — a role is carved out for him. He’s not even confirmed by any elected officials, and then is allowed to just basically go through and start dismantling things from the inside, while also then fattening his own pockets from the same public money that he claims that he is trying to root out waste —

AMY GOODMAN: Branko —

BRANKO MARCETIC: — and fraud from. I mean, it’s pretty astounding. Again —

AMY GOODMAN: Branko, in this last —

BRANKO MARCETIC: — I don’t think we’ve seen anything like this before.

AMY GOODMAN: In this last minute we have, I want to ask you about Ukraine. Ukrainian President Zelensky, headed to Washington, D.C., will sign a deal at the White House on Friday giving the U.S. access to Ukraine’s rare earth minerals and other resources. Trump was asked about Ukraine during his first Cabinet meeting.

REPORTER: Mr. President, on Ukraine, can you tell a little bit about what type of security guarantees you’re willing to make?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Well, I’m not going to make security guarantees, beyond — very much. We’re going to have Europe do that, because it’s in — you know, we’re talking about Europe is their next-door neighbor. But we’re going to make sure everything goes well. And as you know, we’ll be making a — we’ll be really partnering with Ukraine in terms of rare earth. We very much need rare earth. They have great rare earth. We’ll be working with Secretary Burgum and with Chris, where you’ll be working on that together.

AMY GOODMAN: Branko Marcetic, your final comment? We just have 30 seconds.

BRANKO MARCETIC: You know, I think this continues the plundering of Ukraine that has been going on. It’s been bipartisan policy for years now to use deepening U.S. military involvement in the country and economic dependence on the United States as a way to get Ukraine to do a host of damaging neoliberal reforms that are contrary to the interests of the actual Ukrainian people. And this is just — you know, again, it’s that on overdrive.

AMY GOODMAN: Branko Marcetic, I want to thank you very much for joining us, Jacobin staff writer, speaking to us from Chicago. We’ll link to all your recent articles at democracynow.org. Democracy Now! produced with Mike Burke, Renée Feltz, Deena Guzder, Messiah Rhodes, Nermeen Shaikh, María Taracena, Tami Woronoff, Charina Nadura, Sam Alcoff, Tey-Marie Astudillo, John Hamilton, Robby Karran, Hany Massoud. Special thanks to Julie Crosby, Becca Staley.

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