Live Updates: Trump -Administration freezes freezer on federal grants and loans

Mr. Musk has stormed into Washington with a number of friends and paid employees, determined to leave his impression quickly. Never before in modern times has anyone so rich played such a practical role in the US government, where Mr. Musk made up the ubiquitous in Washington, since Mr. Trump’s inauguration flies there for Mr. Trump’s initiation. His flight is not back.

On Mr. Trump’s first day he authorized Mr. Musk by establishing the so -called Department of Government Efficiency, a cost -saving effort that the technical billionaire is leading. Trump gave the group the authority to work on a plan to Reduce size Of the federal workforce, among other things.

Going to Washington with his trademark-single recovery and bravado, Mr. Musk Repriser The Tactics he deployed on Twitter, which he bought in 2022. He has brought the full weight of his Silicon Valley network and installed some of the same managers who cut 80 percent of the social network staff and even use the same e – Mail -Memelial Lines. He has promised “Reducing mass counts across the federal bureaucracy” and now runs to do just that.

Mr. Musk’s slash-first, Fix-Later approach to cost savings has been intentional throughout his career. And some of the early trumps from the Trump administration to freeze funding to federal programs and lure federal workers to resign has led to mass confusion or are legally challenged. (Wednesday the White House went back an order that froze trillion of dollars in federal grants and loans.)

But Mr. Musk will see radical changes – and he is pushing forward.

This article is based on interviews with a dozen people informed of how Mr. Musk has spent his first week in Washington, who all insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about his activities.

Musk allies to oversee the workforce

On Friday, Mr. Musk up in Theodore Roosevelt Federal Building and asked Office of Personal Management staff to produce a list of federal chief information managers. The request reflected how Mr. Musk’s plans appear to involve the agency set to be driven by a supporter of his, Scott Kupor, a Silicon Valley Venture Capitalist in Andreessen Horowitz, who is awaiting Senate confirmation.

Mr. However, Musk does not waste time before Mr. Cupor’s arrival.

Several of Mr. Musk’s top helpers have landed senior advisory roles on Office of Personal Management. They include Brian Bjelde, a Human Resources Director at SpaceX, who has identified himself as the company’s 14th employee and who played a role in Mr. Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, where he helped carry out widespread redundancies. Another arrival is Riccardo Biasini, a director of Boring Company, Mr. Musk’s tunneling company, which also joined Mr. Musk’s team on Twitter.

But the most authorized by Mr. Musk’s allies on the Office of Personal Management have been Anthony Armstrong, a top technology bank in Morgan Stanley, who worked on the billionaire’s acquisition of Twitter in 2022.

Mr. Musk seems to have taken over internal communication. On Tuesday night, an E email from Office of Personal Management offered about two million federal employees the opportunity to resign and be paid through the end of September with the subject line: “Fork in the Road.” It was exactly the subject line that Mr. Musk used to encourage Twitter employees to resign in November 2022.

Most of the people that Mr. Musk has brought to Washington, are young engineers who did not know him but have signed up for 80-hour labor and are deployed in federal agencies.

But he does not have easy confidence in new people, which is why he pretty much calls his inner circle.

Confidential in his enormous war against bureaucracy includes investor Antonio Gracias, a former board member of Tesla, and Terrence O’Hughnessy, a retired four -star Air Force General, one of Mr. Musk’s top advisers at SpaceX. Mr. Musk has pushed Mr. O’SHAUGNESSY for management positions, and the general told others that he was considered a possible compensation for Pete Hegeth under Mr. Hegeth’s turbulent but successful suggestions to lead the Pentagon.

A new person who has got Mr. Musk’s confidence, is Baris Akis, a Turkish-born leader of a Silicon Valley venture company that trained from Stanford in 2016.

Mr. Akis had no meaningful relationship with Mr. Musk until just a few weeks ago. But he was deeply involved in Mr. Trump’s transition-mayor to put more hours than any other technical leader in addition to Mr. Musk-and he has come out of this effort as a right man to Steve Davis, a musk lieutenant who has monitored the Institute of Government Efficiency.

Mr. Davis and Mr. AKIS has been heavily involved in Office of Personal Management in recent weeks. But none of them actually work there. Mr. Today, Davis spends much of his time detailed for the general service administration, which helps manage federal agencies and which is a likely next goal for Mr. Musk’s war against bureaucracy.

At General Services Administration, Mr. Musk installed a Tesla -Software Engineer, Thomas Shedd, which its director of “Technology Formation Services.”

Another Musk Ally, Amanda Scales, who previously worked for the billionaire and before that for Mr. Akis, has played a special outgoing role in the Office of Personnel Management. Federal agencies were asked to send Mrs. Scales a list of the workers who are still on probation – and are therefore easier to shoot.

Ms. Scales has been appointed to the agency’s chief of staff at a time when it has no full -time director, and she has been exposed to a lot of anger online as the face of Mr. Trump’s proposed reductions to the federal workforce.

Fingerprints on key movements

In Washington, Mr. Musk both a celebrity and a bureaucrat, sometimes at the same time.

In a moment, he and several of his billionaire friends, including Mr. Gracias, with fixtures in the Washington establishment at the annual dinner for the Alfalfa Club, where several participants broke the event’s unwritten policy with non-phones and bullied him for selfies. On another, he was discovered in the White House, where 20-staff employees grab sandwiches between meetings-but as opposed to Mr. Musk Most do not return to a West Wing Office to help oversee what Mr. Trump says is a 40-person team that performs his executive orders.

Mr. Musk has found itself focused on bureaucratic maneuvers in his first week.

His team has prioritized finding a way to e -mail all 2.3 million federal civilian employees at once, the type of thing that is easy to do with a company like Tesla, but more challenging to do across the huge federal Workforce where agencies can typically e -mail only their own employees. The Office of Personnel Administration was able to use this list to deliver its memo on Tuesday night.

All this is in pursuit of what Mr. Musk initially said would be $ 2 trillion in annual cost savings using technology, deregulation and budget cuts (he recently lowered his estimate to closer to $ 1 trillion). In several positions on x ago Mr. Trump’s inauguration has the Department of Government Efficiency boasted of more than $ 500 million in immediate savings through Restricting DEI -Initiatives and renegotiation of Unused office lease contractsAs officials called “Originally Focus” in the group.

On the first day of the Trump administration, Mr. Musk’s Team USA Digital Service, a unit in the president’s executive office that has been renamed “US DODE SERVICE.” The service’s approximately 200 employees expect significant redundancies, and another Silicon Valley director Tom Krause has conducted some interviews by employees. Among other questions, Mr. Krause put employees what makes them unique and who the agency’s best workers are.

Mr. Musk’s team has also taken on a number of roles, including IT employees and detectives. Mr. Trump has said that Mr. Musk’s job includes execution of its executive orders. And then Musk has tried to implement its engineers to find ways to turn off the flow of money from the Treasury to things that Mr. Trump wants to postpone.

Mr. Musk’s allies in the Department of Government Efficiency and the White House say they sniffed an attempt from some federal employees to hurry out money to the World Health Organization just after Trump said he withdrew the country from the global agency. Their claims could not be immediately verified.

And according to at least one Trump aid, Mr. Musk also a role in the president’s sweeping appropriation of drug addicts to the people accused in January 6, 2021, attacked Capitol.

In the evening of the prisoners’ release, Paul Ingrassia, a connection connection in the White House to the Ministry of Justice, claimed for an audience in a Washington prison that “Elon Musk knew a lot about this and was MasterMind behind it.”

Next to Mr. Ingrassia was a help to Mr. Musk: Christopher Stanley, who has worked as a security engineer at SpaceX and X and recently moved to a role “in the White House,” said Mr. Ingrassia. Mr. Stanley has complained about social media about federal employees’ work ethics and speed when returning E emails since he arrived in Washington.

Mr. Musk may be something of a super-aide, but he generally likes Mr. Trump’s inner circle, SMS memes and acting Intel with employees worth a minuscule fraction of what he is. He doesn’t find it under him: In a conversation with a friend, Mr. Musk almost amazed at his fortune.

Kirsten Grind and Ryan Mac contributed with reporting.