STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Today, the president holds his first meeting with his Cabinet secretaries since taking office.
LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Yeah. Also expected to show up, special government employee Elon Musk. He has been telling federal employees what to do, though the White House denies he's in charge of anything, and some Cabinet secretaries have asserted their own authority over agencies.
INSKEEP: NPR's Stephen Fowler is covering all this. Stephen, good morning.
STEPHEN FOWLER, BYLINE: Good morning.
INSKEEP: So are all the people around the president on the same page?
FOWLER: Well, the White House says everyone is working as a team. But there's a few people claiming to be captain here, especially around this attempted restructuring of the federal government. Think of it this way, Steve - there's a Venn diagram of what Elon Musk says and does and posts, what the government has said in many court cases challenging Musk's decrees and what federal agencies have actually done. And that Venn diagram has very little overlap right now.
INSKEEP: OK. And I guess an example of that would be this email over the weekend. It appeared over the weekend in everybody's mailboxes - like, 2 million federal employees is what I mean - asking them to just explain what they're doing with their time or what they did last week. How much overlap do you see there in that Venn diagram?
FOWLER: This is a pretty great example where Elon Musk's preference is not government policy, is not what the government does in practice. Musk was repeatedly posting on the platform that he owns this threat of, basically, respond or lose your job. But he's not the boss of anyone within the federal government. And, for the purposes of this request, neither is the agency that sent the email - the Office of Personnel Management. In fact, OPM previously noted in a privacy assessment these government-wide emails are totally optional to respond to. And after some agencies told their people to ignore the request, other people said, do it, OPM muddied the water even more with a memo that had more contradictory guidance about how to respond, and/or not respond, and/or maybe punish employees who didn't. Did you get all that?
INSKEEP: (Laughter) No, I didn't, but please go on. Go on.
FOWLER: Well - so to that point, yesterday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt wrapped it all up with this sort of walk back into some semblance of harmony.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
KAROLINE LEAVITT: So, again, the agency heads will determine the best practices for their employees at their specific agencies. Again, this was an idea that Elon come up with. DOGE worked with OPM to actually implement the idea, and the secretaries are responsible for their specific workforce.
FOWLER: Now, Leavitt did say that a million workers responded by the deadline. But we just don't know what that means or what comes next for them there.
INSKEEP: I appreciate hearing that Elon came up with the idea, according to the White House spokesperson there, because we hear then that a CEO did this thing that, as I understand it, businesspeople will sometimes do. They'll send out a memo like that to everybody, but this is very different than the government is set up and the government works. So where does this go from here?
FOWLER: Well, this Cabinet meeting is going to be worth watching because it's one of the first major public sources of tension between the Trump administration and the implementation of Musk's DOGE effort. But there are some other simmering conflicts in the background. Many of the actions that Musk and DOGE have taken are in court, after running afoul of very particular and explicit set of rules and laws that govern the government.
INSKEEP: Yeah.
FOWLER: And on the same day the White House acknowledged someone else is nominally running the U.S. DOGE Service, nearly two dozen people who worked for the precursor USDS say they're quitting instead of using their skills to, quote, "compromise core government systems." Finally, as we await more details about a planned reduction in force of the remaining workforce, last night, the Merit Systems Protection Board issued a stay on the firing of six probationary employees.
INSKEEP: Wow. Hard to keep track of it all, but we'll do the best we can. NPR's Stephen Fowler. Thanks so much.
FOWLER: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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