President Donald Trump bid a somewhat strange farewell to Elon Musk on Friday in an Oval Office news conference in which the president praised the Tesla CEO’s work as a special government employee overseeing the U.S. DOGE Service.
In a rambling, wide-ranging session before reporters, Trump gifted the world’s richest man with a golden key to cap his tumultuous 130 days of government work. The president heaped praise on the tech billionaire, saying his work at the Department of Government Efficiency had made a “colossal change in the old ways of doing business in Washington.” He added the DOGE employees would continue their work and that Musk himself would still be involved with the administration.
“Elon is really not leaving. He’s going to be back and forth. I think, I have a feeling — it’s his baby, and I think he’s going to be doing a lot of things,” Trump said.
Musk also said he would still be available to advise the president. “I expect to remain a friend and an adviser and if there’s anything the president wants me to do, I’m at the president’s service,” Musk said.
The tech billionaire had announced in a social media post on Wednesday that his time as a government employee was ending and he thanked Trump “for the opportunity to reduce wasteful spending,” adding that the DOGE mission “will only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government.”
That announcement followed an interview with “CBS Sunday Morning” in which Musk said he was disappointed by the Republican budget reconciliation bill passed by the House because it would increase the deficit. In another clip from that interview released this week, Musk said he has “differences of opinion” with the Trump administration.
“There are things I don’t entirely agree with,” he said. “But it’s difficult for me to bring that up in an interview because then it creates a bone of contention. I’m a little stuck in a bind, where I’m like, well, I don’t want to, you know, speak up against the administration, but I don’t want to … take responsibility for everything the administration’s doing.”
Musk leaves with a black eye: Musk appeared in the Oval Office with a black eye that he said was the result of “horsing around” with his 5-year-old son. The bruise was a ready-made metaphor for Musk’s time in Washington, which saw upheaval and uncertainty across numerous agencies as a reported 121,000 federal workers were laid off or targeted for layoffs in the first 100 days of the administration. Thousands of other workers took buyout offers, and the DOGE efforts sparked a widespread backlash, including concerns and pushback from some Trump Cabinet members. Musk’s reputation wasn’t so much bruised as absolutely battered.
Despite all that, the DOGE cuts fell far short of the $1 trillion in savings Musk had targeted let alone the $2 trillion he had initially floated as a possibility. DOGE’s own estimate puts the savings it has generated at $175 billion, though the DOGE numbers and claims have been plagued by errors and some of those purported savings may also be reversed as haphazard cuts are undone. Musk, wearing a “Dogefather” t-shirt in the Oval Office, nevertheless said his promised $1 trillion in savings would be achieved eventually.
Musk was asked by a reporter whether it would be harder to make the government efficient or colonize Mars. “It’s a tough call,” he replied. “But I think colonizing Mars and making life multiplanetary is harder.”
Trump says he supports getting rid of the debt limit: Trump defended the budget reconciliation bill that passed the House, though he said he’d want to see even bigger tax cuts and falsely claimed the package would cut deficits. “It’s an amazing bill. It does amazing things,” Trump said.
Trump also pressed for an extension of the debt limit. “If we don’t extend debt, we’re in default,” Trump said. “We don’t ever want to have a country in default.” He warned that the result could be “catastrophic.”
Trump has in the past suggested that Republicans should allow the government to default if the Biden administration didn’t agree to demands for spending cuts. In the Oval Office on Friday, he brought up past calls by Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren to eliminate the debt limit. “I always agreed with her. That was one thing I agreed with her on,” he said. “She happened to be right on that. It should be gotten rid of, or it should simply be extended. But that’s one of the things it gets taken care of in this bill — that automatically gets extended for a four-year period.”
The GOP bill would raise the debt limit by $4 trillion, which is the largest specified increase ever — but would likely extend the government’s borrowing ability for far less than four years.
Warren responded in a post on X in which she suggested a bipartisan bill to eliminate the debt limit — an idea that would be sure to run into Republican opposition. She also took the opportunity to slam the GOP tax bill, writing that “jacking up the debt limit by $4 trillion to fund more tax breaks for billionaires is an outrage.”