Transcript of Haberman on her biggest takeaway from White House Cabinet meeting

One final note on the woman who holds the position and name, at least, of DOGE administrator, Amy Gleason. Her name was announced yesterday, and the White House has not said how long she's been on the job. We did learn that she led a DOGE meeting last week, but did not say what her role or title was when addressing the staff. For more, we're joined by senior political analyst, Trump biographer, and New York Times senior political correspondent, Maggie Haberman.

Before we talk about the cabinet, Amy Gleason, do we know much about her?

We know some about her. She is the acting Doge administrator. I just want to point out that acting doesn't mean anything in this capacity. This is not a Senate confirmed position, which is what acting refers to. She's just in that role.

She was on vacation in Mexico, which seems-I think might It might still be.

Which is weird timing.

Yeah, I don't think she didn't know that she was the Doge administrator, which some people have been suggesting. I think she did know that. I certainly don't think that she expected it to get rolled out yesterday and announced yesterday. Again, this is saying that if the team involved in all of this, and the White House was not so focused on secrecy, despite saying that they are being very transparent, this would not have been a day's long story. They could have just answered this, and this came up in court proceedings, and I think this is part of why they ultimately said it. But look, she worked in the US Digital Services in the first Trump term for a few years and then overlapped a bit into Biden. She has a long history in the healthcare industry. I think she had a sick child at one point. She was actually honored by the Obama White House at one point as a champion of change. I think that she is actually not unimportant in all of this, but that she is so in the shadows is pretty striking.

What is your biggest takeaway from the cabinet meeting?

That Elon Musk has more significance in Donald Trump's eyes right now than almost any member of that cabinet, at least while they were sitting there. I mean, look.

It didn't seem like anybody in that room. I mean, he's looming in the in the doorway over them. It's fascinating to see.

He's who Donald Trump turned to first. I think part of that is to try to make Elon Musk answer questions that Trump doesn't want to have to answer himself about this email that went out over the weekend. It's actually it's something that Trump is pretty deft at, which is trying to push blame for a problem over on someone else. This was something that Musk created, but it was also something Trump clearly endorsed and did again there. But then, on the other hand, say that if it goes well, it's something that he wanted. We know that there was a lot of chaos within the administration around this email. We know that cabinet secretaries and cabinet agency officials were trying the White House repeatedly for guidance over the weekend because they weren't sure what this meant. Then they were left to their own devices, putting out, in some case, multiple emails, at least one at national security agencies and so forth, saying, Don't respond to this for a variety of reasons. Musk was pretty derisive of the federal workforce just in a sweeping way. So It was Trump at various points in that meeting. I don't know that that's necessarily long term helpful for Trump.

I don't know that it matters for Musk because I don't think Musk is necessarily going to be there all four years, but Trump wants to be.

What's the end game on that? Is there a number of cuts? Because obviously any significant analysis of whose jobs are important, whose jobs are not, what's fraud, waste, and abuse, that would take time. It would take coordination, none of which is going on. They're just going in in a cis-admin position and just calling people.

That's how Musk has operated at other companies. It's not surprising that he's applying it here. He is applying what has been a logic. It's not strategic, a logic in how he's approaching it, but certainly a logic to how he has handled budgets at companies he's taken over and tried to change them. It's a little harder in the federal government. To your point, you can end up cutting things that become politically problematic for you. They are moving so fast that I'm not sure how much of this in for readers or people watching us right now, but for people whose jobs are affected or whose programs are affected, they may care. In some cases, some of them will turn out to have been Trump supporters.

A lot of people are veterans as well. That's right. Working for the federal government. I want to play something else the President said at the cabinet meeting.

Is it your view of your authority that you have the power to call up any one or all of the people seated at this table and issue orders that they're bound to follow? Oh, yeah. They'll follow the I've noticed, yes. No exceptions. No exceptions. Well, let's see. Let me think. She'll have an exception. Of course, no exceptions. You know that.

It's interesting to hear the force laughter with a lot of the... Maybe it's real laughter. It just sounds odd to me.

Look, I think that everybody in that administration knew that this was going to be a different type of administration than the first term. I think that the people who helped pick these cabinet secretaries were looking for people who they believed were going to align with Trump, who are not going to try to stymied his agenda. Trump did feel stymied in his agenda, and with reason in some in cases, but in other cases, there were people who believed that he was asking them to do something that was out of the scope of what they could do or was inappropriate and so forth. It depends on what we're talking about here. If he's calling up the Treasury Secretary and asking him to do something related to something in the Treasury Department, if he's calling up Howard Lutnik and it relates to commerce, that's a little different than if he's calling up, say, the Secretary of Defense and issuing an order related to the military that somebody else in a different position might take issue with. I think that's where this gets unclear.

Thank you, everyone. Thanks so much. Appreciate.