Inside the explosive meeting where Rubio clashed with Musk

WASHINGTON - Mr 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, Mr Elon Musk was letting Mr Rubio have it, accusing him of failing to slash his staff.

You have fired “nobody”, Mr Musk told Mr Rubio, then scornfully added that perhaps the only person he had fired was a staff member from Mr Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (Doge).

Mr Rubio had been privately furious with Mr Musk for weeks, ever since his team effectively shuttered an entire agency that was supposedly under Mr Rubio’s control: the US Agency for International Development. But, in the extraordinary Cabinet meeting in front of US President Donald Trump and around 20 others – details of which have not been reported before – Mr Rubio got his grievances off his chest.

Mr Musk was not being truthful, Mr 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 Mr 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 reorganising the State Department.

Mr Musk was unimpressed. He told Mr 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 amount of time, Mr Trump finally intervened to defend Mr Rubio as doing a “great job”. Mr Rubio has a lot to deal with, the President said. He is very busy, he is always travelling 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 Mr Trump’s second term. It yielded the first significant indication that Mr Trump was willing to put some limits on Mr 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.

From now on, Mr Trump said, the secretaries would be in charge; the Musk team would only advise.

It is unclear what the long-term impact of the meeting will be. Mr Musk remains Mr Trump’s biggest political financial supporter – just this week, his super political action committee aired US$1 million (S$1.3 million) worth of advertisements that said “Thank you, President Trump” – and Mr Musk’s control of social platform X has made administration staff and Cabinet secretaries alike fearful that he will target them in public.

Just moments before the blow-up with Mr Rubio, Mr Musk and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy went back and forth about the state of the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) equipment for tracking airplanes and what kind of fix was needed. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick jumped in to support Mr Musk.

Mr Duffy said the young staff of Mr Musk’s team was trying to lay off air traffic controllers. What am I supposed to do? Mr Duffy said. I have multiple plane crashes to deal with now, and your people want me to fire air traffic controllers? Mr Musk told Mr Duffy that his assertion was a “lie”. Mr Duffy insisted it was not; he had heard it from them directly. Mr Musk, asking who had been fired, said: Give me their names. Tell me their names.

Mr Duffy said there were not any names, because he had stopped them from being fired. At another point, Mr Musk insisted that people hired under diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes were working in control towers. Mr Duffy pushed back and Mr Musk did not add details, but said during the longer back-and-forth that Mr Duffy had his phone number and should call him if he had any issues to raise.

The exchange ended with Mr Trump telling Mr Duffy that he had to hire people from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as air traffic controllers. These air traffic controllers need to be “geniuses”, he said.

Veterans Affairs (VA) Secretary Doug Collins has been dealing with one of the most politically sensitive challenges of all the Cabinet secretaries. Mr Musk’s cuts will affect thousands of veterans – a powerful constituency and a core part of the Trump base. Mr Collins made the point that they should not wield a blunt instrument and cleave off everyone from the VA. They needed to be strategic about it. Mr Trump agreed with Mr Collins, saying they ought to retain the smart ones and get rid of the bad ones.

In response to a request for comment from The New York Times, Ms Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in a statement: “As President Trump said, this was a great and productive meeting among members of his team to discuss cost-cutting measures and staffing across the federal government. Everyone is working as one team to help President Trump deliver on his promise to make our government more efficient.”

Ms Tammy Bruce, a spokesperson for the State Department, responded: “Secretary Rubio considered the meeting an open and productive discussion with a dynamic team that is united in achieving the same goal: making America great again.”

A Department of Veterans Affairs spokesperson said: “As President Trump has said, it’s important to increase efficiency and reduce bureaucracy while keeping in place the best and most productive federal employees. VA is working with Doge and the rest of the administration to do just that.”

In a post on X on March 7, Mr Duffy praised Mr Trump and the work Mr Musk’s team is doing and said it was an effective Cabinet meeting. He added that “the DEI department at the FAA was eliminated on Day 2” and that Mr Trump’s “approach of a scalpel versus a hatchet and better coordination between secretaries and Doge is the right approach to revolutionising the way our government is run”.

Mr Musk, who later claimed on X that the Cabinet meeting was “very productive”, seemed far less enthused inside the room. He aggressively defended himself, reminding the Cabinet secretaries that he had built multiple billion-dollar companies from the ground up and knew something about hiring good people. NYTIMES