Trump’s first full cabinet meeting celebrates government-shrinking effort led by Musk

Donald Trump used his first full cabinet meeting of his second term to emphasize his administration’s focus on drastically reducing the size of the federal government, with tech billionaire Elon Musk warning without evidence that “America will go bankrupt” without significant spending cuts.

The meeting, which featured very minimal input from cabinet secretaries, instead highlighted the government-shrinking effort being led by Musk, who is not a member of the cabinet and described himself as “humble tech support” for the administration.

The meeting came just as federal agencies have been ordered to submit plans by mid-March for what an official memo described as “large-scale reductions in force” – signaling an escalation in the president’s efforts to reshape the federal workforce.

Trump praised Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin’s plans to cut up to 65% of employees at the agency, though Musk declined to specify how many federal jobs they were seeking to eliminate overall, saying only that he wanted to “keep people who are doing good work in essential roles”.

Musk, who runs the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) team, said their goal was to achieve “$1tn in deficit reduction by financial year 2026” – already halving the $2tn in cuts he had promised during the campaign. He claimed this would require “saving $4bn per day, every day” until the end of September.

“We simply cannot sustain a country with $2tn deficits,” Musk said. “The interest on the national debt now exceeds the defense department spending... If this continues, the country will become de facto bankrupt.”

Trump and Musk also addressed the controversy surrounding an email sent to federal workers demanding they list five achievements from the previous week – a directive that some agency leaders had told their employees to ignore due to national security concerns.

Musk claimed the email was “not meant as a performance review” but rather “a pulse check review” to search for “phantom employees”. He added that Trump had approved sending the email, which had caught cabinet secretaries off guard.

Musks says the directive has since been modified, and would let employees simply say they are working on classified matters in their response.

While Trump has renewed his pledge to balance the budget and pay down the national debt, his previous administration added $8.4tn in new borrowing over 10 years, despite his 2016 campaign promise to eliminate the entire national debt during eight years in office.

During the gathering, Trump – who dominated the speaking time – repeated several false claims, including that European nations would recover money sent to Ukraine in aid, a statement that the French president, Emmanuel Macron, had directly corrected during a meeting in the Oval Office this week.

Trump also made public his intention to impose 25% tariffs on European Union imports, declaring the bloc “was formed to screw the United States”. He said the decision had already been made and would be announced officially “very soon”, specifically mentioning that the levies would target car imports among other goods.

He also pushed back tariffs on Canada and Mexico for another month, delaying implementation until 2 April – just two days after saying they would proceed on 4 March – and continued to suggest that Canada should become a US state.