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Musk Ends Historic And Chaotic Four Months In Government; At Least 121,000 Federal Workers Targeted In DOGE Layoffs; Far-Right Activist With History Of Anti-Gay Rhetoric Fired From Kennedy Center After CNN Investigation; HHS Cancels Moderna Contract For Bird Flu Vaccine; Grandson Of 10th President John Tyler Dies At 96; Trump Has Been Setting Two-Week Deadlines Since At Least 2017. Aired 12:30-1p ET

Aired May 29, 2025 - 12:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[12:31:54]

DANA BASH, CNN HOST: The White House is officially off-boarding Elon Musk from his role as special government employee. It's a bit of an anticlimactic end to a dramatic story of the world's richest man's foray as a government worker. Musk spent over a quarter of $1 billion to elect Donald Trump, money that helped get him a job and an office near the Oval, a seat at Cabinet meetings, sleepovers in the Lincoln bedroom, maybe even on the floor of the office he was working in, and a spot in the White House history books.

(BEGIN VIDEOCLIP)

ELON MUSK, TESLA CEO: Some of the things that I say will be incorrect and should be corrected. So nobody's going to bat a thousand.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He's working for free for you.

MUSK: Well, I love the president. I just want to be clear about that.

DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Elon called me. He said, you know they're trying to drive us apart. I said absolutely.

MUSK: Social Security is the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.

This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy.

TRUMP: Thank you all very much. I love Tesla.

(END VIDEOCLIP)

BASH: And in a goodbye post thanking President, Musk said quote, "The DOGE mission will only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government".

The panel is back to discuss along with David Fahrenthold, he is an investigative reporter at the New York Times who has dug into all things DOGE and also a new CNN Political Analyst. Welcome on all fronts.

DAVID FAHRENTHOLD, INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER, THE NEW YORK TIMES: Thanks.

BASH: I just want to show just not that you need any credentials for our viewers but I just -- I think it's fascinating how much you have written about DOGE. Those are just some examples of your headlines. So I want to start with the following question.

On the DOGE website, it says that they have found $175 billion in estimated savings. Fact check, true, false?

FAHRENTHOLD: A lot of that claim is not substantiated at all. They haven't shown us the receipts. They call it the wall of receipts but there's no receipts for a huge amount of that savings. And also even when the savings where they do say they have receipts.

When you look closely you find that there's huge errors, many of which make DOGE's savings seem bigger than they are. They double count the same things. They count things that actually happened under President Biden or even President George W. Bush. So there's all kinds of guesswork and errors in there that pump that total up. We don't know what the real number is.

BASH: OK. And my next question before we continue to go around the horn here is one of the most famous or infamous things that Elon Musk has said in the past four months is that DOGE was like Buddhism. That meaning it survived without Buddha. Comparing himself of course to Buddha.

Is that -- do we think that's true? Because there are still DOGE officials throughout the federal government in these agencies looking at waste and doing other things. Do we think that it's really going to continue without him at the helm?

FAHRENTHOLD: My guess is that it won't in any sort of meaningful form. The people that are in these positions are generally either Elon Musk sort of lackeys. People have been following Elon Musk from job to job and I imagine those people will leave or they're very young and they're not the kind of people who are going to have expertise or stature to do this stuff on their own.

[12:35:03]

In fact, I think you can already see where this is going by looking at the House's bill that was supposed to enact President Trump's big agenda. The one big beautiful bill. Remember that DOGE was supposed to cut $2 trillion in the federal deficit and the progress they've made along that way Elon Musk said was really important to saving money.

But that bill would wipe out that and far more would add to the deficit, $3 trillion. So with Musk leaving the scene, Trump is already going far in the other direction.

JEFF ZELENY, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: It's not immediately over though. I mean I've heard from agency after agency of several former DOGE, people are now working for the agencies. Like they're embedded in there --

BASH: Right.

ZELENY: -- as actual employees and agencies. So I think the thing we don't know, I agree with you, I do not think it is going to be a priority of the White House. And without Elon Musk there, DOGE does not have a seat at the Cabinet meetings. They just don't.

BASH: Yes.

ZELENY: But I think the question is, what's been lost in all of this? And I think that's sort of immeasurable in terms of intellectual knowledge and other just institutional knowledge over the years. So we shall see. But just watching that image of the chainsaw to slash the bureaucracy, it was too hard for him.

But he caved to political pressure here and business pressure. That's what's so interesting. And now he's stepping out of politics. It's extraordinary.

BASH: Yes I think it's the business pressure part of it, right, as much -- if not more than the political pressure. And you were saying when we were coming out of break, that image of him with the chainsaw, that was like three months ago?

FAHRENTHOLD: Three months ago. You're right, yes.

BASH: It's so crazy.

FAHRENTHOLD: Strange thing is after he does the chainsaw, he says, we're going to do good things and we're going to have a good time doing it.

BASH: Yes.

FAHRENTHOLD: Just think about how far we've come since that.

BASH: Yes.

JONAH GOLDBERG, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Yes. So I've probably written a dozen columns over the last 25 years about how the phrase run government like a business is hot garbage. And it's not because businessmen aren't smart, it's because government isn't a business and nor is it a Silicon Valley tech startup.

And so I have no problem believing that a lot of the DOGE bros were smarter than the people they were dealing with. But the people they were dealing with knew how their institutions worked. They knew how the process worked.

And these guys didn't. And I think it set back the argument about waste, fraud, and abuse in government which is legit.

BASH: How so?

GOLDBERG: Because they didn't find what they were so confident they were going to find because they didn't know how to look for it. I guarantee you. If you sent Mitch Daniels in with a team of experienced nerds, they could have cut a lot of waste, fraud, and abuse from government. But it would have taken them about a year and a half to study the systems, to check things out to come up with recommendations and actually understand what they were doing. These guys didn't.

BASH: So then --

ZELENY: They also got rid of the IG's.

GOLFBERG: Right.

ZELENY: And the Inspector Generals at the very beginning were thrown out. So that was our first clue.

BASH: Right, our first clue. And this is exactly where I was going to go with this that, was it really about just cutting waste, fraud, and abuse? No. I mean, it just wasn't. It was about making some specific cuts, ideological cuts, cultural places where they had cultural differences. And you saw a lot of that with the agencies that we put up on the screen about a minute ago that were decimated by DOGE.

Well this ties back to a larger problem that Trump has and Jonah kind of alluded to it here is that, they make these big sweeping promises and a lot of the things that they want to do a lot of Americans maybe do agree with, oh, let's cut waste, fraud, and abuse in the system. But those aren't things that you do overnight.

But Trump by setting these types of targets and Elon Musk did it hand- in-hand with him in the -- on the campaign trail saying, oh, within a month, we're going to do X, or within three months we're going to do and we can in the first year cut this many. And these dramatic figures, these inflated figures, it's just not possible to do that and certainly not in the amount of time in the arbitrary timelines that they create which sort of ties to a broader point that we see in the Trump administration where he comes out and says oh I'm going to get things done in a certain amount of time and doesn't do so.

GOLDBERG: And you can see Ron DeSantis seeing the lane three years from now, where he's saying, look, Congress hasn't enacted any of the recommendations from DOGE. They haven't followed what we're doing ever. Because Ron DeSantis -- people can have all sorts of problems with him. He's a serious guy who knows how government actually works.

And I think he sees this competency lane opening up where Trump talks big he gets his press release headlines but actually doesn't deliver. And DeSantis I think, his only safe space sort of psychologically politically is to be the guy who can deliver Trumpism competently and he's starting to make those sounds.

BASH: So, when you look at the big numbers, the cuts to the federal workforce, 121,000 plus. Now, that does not include people who took voluntary buyouts. So -- but, again, I think the point is that that's a lot of people and there is definitely a lot of people who have a lot of experience. The brain drain is real, but it certainly doesn't tell the whole story. FAHRENTHOLD: Yes. And the point was, from Musk, was always that yes, there's going to be disruption. Yes, there's going to be pain. People going to lose their jobs but it's in the service of something greater. When I'm done, you'll see the reason I had to make all these great disruptions.

[12:40:00]

And now he's basically leaving without fulfilling that. We haven't gotten anywhere near the deficit reduction he talked about. There hasn't really been a change of the government's IT or other processes that make my life easier. There's nothing that the success he promised that would be the payoff for that pain.

GOLDBERG: It's all vandalism at this point.

FAHRENTHOLD: Yes.

GOLDBERG: It's performative vandalism that his -- it's owning the libs by destroying government institutions without a larger purpose.

BASH: One of the questions as he was sort of hoovering up all of the information is what he was going to do with it. Do we know -- did he -- is he sort of laughing on his way out the door, like, I have everybody's information right now and see you?

FAHRENTHOLD: And we haven't seen an indication that he's taking that with him. That would certainly be a huge problem if he was taking this, you know, government -- what they call a data lake dumping data on all of us into one big pile that shouldn't be all combined together. I don't think there's any sign he's taking it with him.

The question is what if anything the government will do with it now that he's gone. And that's a very hard thing to make work, it's a very hard database to make operate. If they ever did, you know, it would be really useful for them for immigration crackdowns and for a number of other things that, you know, the Trump administration might want to do. But we haven't seen any sign that he operationalized it in government or that he's taking it with him.

BASH: Fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. Thank you all.

Don't go anywhere. Up next, we're going to tell you why a president born in the 18th century is making news now in the 21st century. A little political trivia is coming up after a quick break.

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[12:45:57]

BASH: Tapping our political radar, a far-right activist with a history of anti-gay rhetoric says he was fired by the Kennedy Center, now run by Trump allies after a CNN investigation into his past comments. CNN's KFILE found examples of Floyd Brown calling homosexuality, quote, "a punishment on America", and also promoted conspiracy theories about Barack Obama's birthplace. Brown served for about a month in a top fundraising job and says he was fired just hours after CNN reached out to the Kennedy Center to ask about those and other comments.

After years of right wing pundits pushing unfounded claims about MRNA vaccines, the Trump administration is making a major change that could have serious implications on public health. The Health and Human Services Department is terminating a $590 million contract with the drug maker of Moderna to develop a bird flu vaccine.

It's part of the RFK Jr. led push to reassess the use of MRNA based therapies. Of course, this technology is already used in licensed vaccines, including the COVID-19 vaccine that is shown to be safe and effective and saved millions of lives.

And now to what was a head scratching piece of political history. The 10th U.S. President John Tyler, who was born in the 18th century, had a grandson living well into the 21st century. But after a long, wonderful life, Harris Ruffin Tyler died this week at age 96.

Now, I know you're probably wondering, as we did, how it is possible that more than 179 years after President Tyler left the Oval Office, this could happen. Well, the answer involves two generations of late second marriages to much younger wives and very good genes.

President Trump has a magic number, whether it's a major policy decision, a ceasefire negotiation or a big announcement. Why it's always two weeks away? That's next.

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[12:52:22]

BASH: Just give the president two weeks. As our Kevin Liptak very smartly points out, in Trump's telling a resolution in Ukraine is always two weeks away, here's what he means.

(BEGIN VIDEOCLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Do you trust President Putin?

TRUMP: You know in about two weeks.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Is Ukraine doing enough to get this --

TRUMP: I'd rather tell you in about two weeks from now, because I can't say yes or no.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Do you still believe that Putin actually wants to end the war?

TRUMP: I can't tell you that, but I'll let you know in about two weeks, within two weeks.

(END VIDEOCLIP)

BASH: Now, if this two-week time frame sounds familiar, it should. Those of us who have been covering Donald Trump for a long time have been waiting two weeks on a lot of issues for years.

(BEGIN VIDEOCLIP)

TRUMP: I'll be making a big decision on the Paris Accord over the next two weeks.

We've got the plan largely completed and we'll be filing it over the next two or three weeks.

We're going to be having a news conference in about two weeks to let everybody know how well we're doing.

To make that decision, I would say over the next two weeks.

Over the next two, three weeks, we'll be setting the number.

At some point in the next two weeks or three weeks, I'm going to be setting the deal.

(END VIDEOCLIP)

BASH: Our deadline-conscious reporters are back here.

ZELENY: And look, a lot of those fall by the wayside because there's so much going on and often that does not reach the two-week period. But that's always been a go-to of his because it keeps something in a forward motion and there's very little follow-through. But I think on this specifically, the Ukraine and Putin conversation, he's been saying that for months, give a couple weeks for a Putin.

And Putin has been running around him, you know, and moving the goalposts and everything else. So they're consequential issues. We shouldn't laugh about that. They absolutely are. But they constantly get the can as kicked down the road, if you will.

SABRINA RODRIGUEZ, NATIONAL POLITICS REPORTER, THE WASHINGTON POST: In some ways, it's really because he doesn't know what to do in this situation, you know. Trump, of course, we've talked a million times about. You know, he had said he would resolve the war in 24 hours or it would be resolved before he even came into office.

This is a very complicated issue to tackle. I mean, without a doubt, whether it was Trump in the White House or not, Biden had a lot of struggles when it came to navigating the war and how to try and bring this to an end. But given that, there has not really been a movement from Putin. This is a way of sort of punting it.

And we're all familiar with finding ways to say, oh, we'll get it done tomorrow. But really, we know we're not going to. And this is sort of a way of putting that off because he just hasn't decided what the course of action is.

GOLDBERG: Yes, there are two reasons why he doesn't two weeks. I mean, I'm still waiting. He said nine years ago, 10 years ago, two weeks, they're going to have the replacement for Obamacare.

[12:55:01]

BASH: Healthcare. Oh my gosh, I'm so glad you said that. I said that this morning.

GOLDBERG: But -- so one is the reasons you're saying, right? It's just -- he doesn't know or whatever. But the other one is like with so many of these things, Trump wants the headline more than he wants any of the substance for stuff. And so he says, I'm going to do X in two weeks.

It gets channeled throughout all his, you know, favorable media and all that kind of stuff. He raises money off of it. And then in two weeks later, there's some other thing he's announcing.

BASH: But it is interesting after all these years, you -- they definitely -- it's such an obvious tell --

GOLDBERG: Yes.

BASH: -- that he's buying time, which you know what? We all need to buy time in some ways, but maybe he'll come up with a different hold button.

Thanks, everybody. Thanks for being here.

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