Time - During his first cabinet meeting on Wednesday, President Donald Trump asked Elon Musk to give an update on his work to slash the federal workforce and government spending. Wearing a black “Make America Great Again” baseball hat and a T-shirt printed with the words “TECH SUPPORT,” an animated Musk told the cabinet officials about plans to cut $1 trillion from their budgets and further cull their staff. He acknowledged that the teams he’s sent into agencies had sometimes gone too far, recalling how funding to prevent deadly Ebola outbreaks was “accidentally” cut off. “We won’t be perfect, but when we make a mistake, we’ll fix it very quickly,” he said.
But those mistakes are already proving costly—and embarrassing—as the administration’s cuts hit critical functions of government like nuclear security, pandemic prevention, and veteran assistance, prompting officials to backtrack. Less than six weeks into Trump’s presidency, the administration has already reversed itself more than a dozen times in high-profile decisions.
The many reversals, to be clear, do little to undercut the extent to which the administration is making good on Trump's goal of remaking much of the federal government. Many of the changes already carried out by Trump are irreversible. Thousands of federal workers at the Internal Revenue Service and the Defense, Energy and Veterans Affairs Departments have been fired. Tens of thousands of others have resigned under pressure from Musk. USAID, which administers billions in food and medical assistance around the world, has been hollowed out. Even Musk's claim that the Ebola prevention funding had been fully restored has been called into question by current and former USAID officials.Yet the sheer number of the reversals reflect an administration moving much faster than usual. More
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