00:00Time Magazine features once again Elon Musk, this time sitting at the Resolute Desk,
00:05normally reserved for the President of the United States.
00:08This time we felt that the actions that Elon Musk has been taking,
00:13and the kind of power he's been wielding,
00:16the ability to shut down entire federal agencies,
00:19the ability to strike fear in the hearts of millions of government workers in the federal bureaucracy,
00:26it shows that he's gone beyond just an advisor to President Trump.
00:30He's wielding power almost on the level of the President himself.
00:34The last time that we had Elon Musk on the cover of Time,
00:38it was soon after the presidential elections,
00:41and by then it was already clear that Musk would play a significant and probably dramatic role
00:47in the administration of Donald Trump.
00:50At the time, we compared Elon Musk's influence to that of the newspaper magnate
00:58William Randolph Hearst back in the 1930s, who helped shepherd FDR to power back then.
01:07They have some interesting parallels, but what we're seeing with Musk today
01:10really eclipses anyone that we could think of in the newsroom as a historical precedent.
01:17Really never in the history of the United States, as far as we could tell,
01:22has a private citizen wielded so much power over the U.S. government.
01:28The ability to change it root and branch,
01:31the ability to snatch away the power of the purse from Congress,
01:34and make decisions that directly influence the way that money is spent,
01:40the way that resources are allocated within the federal government.
01:43Musk has shown an ability just in the first weeks and days of the Trump administration
01:49to do those things, to really impact the way that the federal government functions,
01:57the agencies that survive or don't survive in the U.S. government,
02:02and that is a really remarkable shift in the way American democracy works.
02:08One of the people we quoted in the story was Representative Jamie Raskin,
02:11who noted outside of the offices of the U.S. Agency for International Development,
02:17we do not have a fourth branch of government called Elon Musk.
02:22But more and more, I think, as the days have gone on in the second Trump administration,
02:27many Americans have gotten the feeling that Elon Musk is approaching
02:32the influence of something like a fourth branch of government.
02:36Certainly, he doesn't fit neatly into any of the other three.
02:40Some of the other branches of government,
02:44specifically the courts, have started to block and hinder some of his actions.
02:50Many Democrats, certainly on Capitol Hill, have really started speaking up
02:55and quite aggressively trying to push back on some of the things that Elon Musk is doing.
03:02We'll see if they have success.
03:03I think the courts have a much better chance of really making a difference
03:08in terms of controlling or providing some checks and balances to what Musk is doing,
03:14but that remains to be seen.
03:16One of the things that was really striking in the reporting for this story
03:20was talking to the people directly affected by Musk's effort to cut and cull the federal bureaucracy.
03:29These are former civil servants, now former,
03:32who lost their jobs because of Musk's efforts to cut workers, to cut the headcount.
03:40There were some really dramatic stories.
03:42People who had their email accounts abruptly shut off,
03:46who were locked out of the agencies where they had worked for many years,
03:51and they were really at a loss.
03:53Some of them didn't know whether they would have a job the next day.
03:57Some of them had just been informed very crudely that they were out,
04:02that they were put on administrative leave indefinitely.
04:06We talked to some of these people.
04:08We met them.
04:08They are coming forward.
04:10Some of them were too afraid to talk on the record and give their names,
04:15but I think the sheer number of people who were affected by Musk's actions
04:20suggest that we could see a groundswell of opposition to what he's doing.
04:24The people that he is affecting, federal workers,
04:29people who have worked in the bureaucracy for many years,
04:31they know how the government works.
04:33They know their rights,
04:34and they are beginning now to organize against what Musk is doing.
04:38I do think that in the coming days, weeks, months,
04:40we're going to see quite some pushback in the courts
04:43and potentially also in the streets to Elon Musk's actions and ambitions.
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