Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook: Remaking Government, your guide to Donald Trump’s unprecedented overhaul of the federal government — the key decisions, the critical characters and the power dynamics that are upending Washington and beyond.
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ELON MUSK is having one of his worst days since entering politics — seeing his financial and personal influence beaten back, absorbing a hit to his wealth and watching President DONALD TRUMP look for an exit door for his role in the West Wing.
Musk and groups he backed spent $20 million on a Wisconsin Supreme Court race whose outcome, he said, could affect “the entire destiny of humanity.”
On Tuesday night, his candidate lost by 10 points.
As the sun rose today, Musk’s company, Tesla, announced a 13 percent drop in quarterly sales — the firm’s largest plunge ever, underperforming analysts’ already-bleak estimates.
Much of Musk’s vast wealth comes from Tesla, a stock market wunderkind which, in the 15 years since its initial public offering, has exploded into one of the most valuable companies in history. But its valuation has plummeted since the election, driven in no small part by Musk’s controversial role in the White House.
That, too, looks like it’s coming to an end.
The DOGE chief, who has jubilantly barreled through the federal bureaucracy since Trump took office, is staring down a late May or early June deadline, after which his “special government employee” designation will mandate he cease his work.
Against a backdrop of Musk’s low favorability ratings, reported tiffs with Cabinet secretaries and the Wisconsin loss — which Democrats, and Musk himself, framed as a referendum on the billionaire — Trump has informed his inner circle that Musk will retreat after his status terminates, our RACHAEL BADE reports.
It’s a reversal from just a month ago, when White House officials were prepared to find a way around the 130-day limit.
And to rub salt in the wound, a new poll released today out of Milwaukee-based Marquette University found approval of how Musk is handling his work at DOGE stands at 41 percent, with disapproval at 58 percent, our ALI BIANCO reports. Musk’s personal favorability, the poll found, is 38 percent, with 60 percent of respondents viewing him unfavorably.
Taken together, Musk’s rotten day spells trouble for a man who may finally be reaching the limits of his rapid political ascent.
That success, so far, has been fueled by nearly unlimited resources paired with the move-fast-and-break-things approach that won him his fortune in Silicon Valley — and the president’s respect. But Washington is not Palo Alto, and political figures are under different pressures than CEOs.
Musk, for one, seems to be taking it with a fair bit of nihilism.
“As I mentioned several years ago, it increasingly appears that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence,” he posted on X at 3:33 a.m. ET today, about five hours after the Associated Press called the race for liberal judge SUSAN CRAWFORD and five hours before Tesla’s sales release hit the Business Wire.
In other words: People are stupid and their only function is to unwittingly craft an AI that could ultimately cause their downfall.
Or was it all part of the plan?
About 20 minutes before, he posted on X: “I expected to lose, but there is value to losing a piece for a positional gain.”
A DOGE spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
MESSAGE US — West Wing Playbook is obsessively covering the Trump administration’s reshaping of the federal government. Are you a federal worker? A DOGE staffer? Have you picked up on any upcoming DOGE moves? We want to hear from you on how this is playing out. Email us at [email protected].
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What was former President JAMES BUCHANAN’s drink of choice?
(Answer at bottom.)
FIRST IN WEST WING PLAYBOOK: Rep. ROB BRESNAHAN (R-Pa.), who has defended DOGE’s work to reduce the size of the government, doesn’t seem to have the same amount of confidence in Musk’s company, Tesla. He’s recently sold thousands of dollars’ worth of Tesla shares, our DANIEL LIPPMAN writes in.
In August 2024, Bresnahan reported that he held Tesla stock worth between $15,000 and $50,000. But on Feb. 27 and March 6 of this year, he sold between $2,000 and $30,000 of the company’s stock, according to a disclosure report. (Lawmakers can list stock value in ranges instead of exact figures.)
Bresnahan has spoken up in favor of DOGE’s work, saying in mid-February that “everything Donald Trump said he was going to do on the campaign trail is exactly what he’s doing … [i]n exposing the waste, exposing the fraud and the abuse.” But he’s also hinted that DOGE’s work hasn’t always been spot-on, telling a local radio show that recent staff cuts at the Steamtown National Historic Site were one of the “things that come out of Pennsylvania Avenue that just happen. But at the end of the day here, we try to do and clarify different situations, different challenges.”
Bresnahan spokesperson HANNAH POPE said the lawmaker does not handle his own stock trading and questioned what Tesla stock has “to do with DOGE cancelling wasteful government spending,” while criticizing POLITICO.
MIKE, YOU’VE DONE IT AGAIN: National security adviser MIKE WALTZ’s team regularly set up chats on the encrypted messaging app Signal to coordinate on issues including Ukraine, China, Gaza, Middle East policy, Africa and Europe, according to four people who have been personally added to the chats, our DASHA BURNS reports. Two of the people said they were in or have direct knowledge of at least 20 Signal chats. All four said they saw instances of sensitive information being discussed.
“Waltz built the entire NSC communications process on Signal,” said one of the people. Veteran national security officials have warned that this use of Signal could violate regulations on protecting sensitive national security information from foreign adversaries and federal recordkeeping laws, if the chat is set to automatically disappear.
“It was commonplace to stand up chats on any given national security topic,” said one of the people involved in the chats, adding that the groups oftentimes included Cabinet members and high-level staff.
None of the four individuals said they knew of any classified information shared in the chats, but all said that posts in the group chats included sensitive details of national security work.
DOGE HITS NEH: Employees at the National Endowment for the Humanities on Tuesday were informed by senior leadership that they can soon expect mass layoffs at the agency after DOGE entered the building on Friday, two people familiar with the situation told West Wing Playbook. NEH employees were told that 50 to 70 percent of positions could be eliminated at the 180-person agency.
DOGE also recommended cutting nearly all NEH grant programs and ending unspent payments from grant programs since 2021. Those payments cover salaries for a range of experts, said a spokesperson for NEH’s union. “We have staff who come from universities, from museums, from archives, and bring that specialized expertise. We stand to lose a lot of that knowledge and ability to support the field through that.”
NEH pays primarily for higher education programs in universities and community colleges, along with other public programs in museums and elsewhere. “People who come to work here feel really passionately about this work,” the spokesperson said. “They feel strongly that the humanities can help make us have a stronger civic fabric in our country and that studying history and philosophy, and all the subjects in humanities make us better.”
It comes weeks after SHELLY C. LOWE, a JOE BIDEN appointee, was forced out of her role leading NEH by DOGE.
A spokesperson for DOGE did not respond to a request for comment.
FAUCI ON HIS MIND: HHS Secretary ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR. is enacting revenge on a man who he has long attacked: ANTHONY FAUCI.
As our ADAM CANCRYN and ERIN SCHUMAKER report, Kennedy on Tuesday fired Fauci’s wife, CHRISTINE GRADY, from her role as head of the National Institutes of Health Clinical Centers’ bioethics department and reassigned at least three of Fauci’s longtime colleagues at NIH, as part of a purge of senior officials involved in the government’s development and distribution of the Covid-19 vaccine.
The removals, which came amid a mass reduction of HHS workforce, effectively gutted leadership at NIH’s infectious disease office and key parts of the FDA. Several NIH leaders were told to accept reassignment to outposts in states like Alaska or leave the government altogether. One of them was JEANNE MARRAZZO, who succeeded Fauci at NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
CLIFFORD LANE, a 45-year veteran of the NIH and close Fauci ally as NIAID deputy director of clinical research, and NIAID microbiology and infectious diseases director EMILY ERBELDING, also lost their jobs.
HEADS UP, PROBATIONARY WORKERS: A federal judge in Baltimore issued a preliminary injunction Tuesday that continues to block the firing of many probationary workers across 18 significant federal agencies, but he added a major caveat: Under his new order, only employees who live or work in 19 blue states and D.C. will be protected from dismissal, our JOSH GERSTEIN writes in.
Noting “heated debates” over nationwide injunctions, Judge JAMES BREDAR tailored the injunction to the states that filed the suit before him, which claims the federal government ignored legal requirements to notify states before a mass layoff.
Another federal judge in San Francisco also blocked the mass firing of probationary employees at six federal departments. The Trump administration has already appealed that ruling to the Supreme Court. It’s not clear that either judge’s order will protect the probationary employees in the long term if the administration jumps through the proper legal hoops to carry out the layoffs.
TASTE OF YOUR OWN MEDICINE: New York lawmakers are pushing back on Trump’s executive orders and Musk’s government slashing work, NYT’s JAY ROOT and BENJAMIN ORESKES report. Two Democratic legislators are introducing a bill today aimed at Musk and the so-called Buffalo Billion Project, in which the state spent $959 million to build and equip a plant that Musk’s company leases for $1 a year to operate a solar panel and auto component factory.
The bill would require a full audit of the project to “identify waste, fraud and abuse committed by private parties to the contract.” It would determine whether the company, Tesla, was meeting job creation targets, making promised investments, paying enough rent and honoring job training commitments.
“It’s the height of hypocrisy that Elon Musk, the man who is dismantling federal agencies and doing enormous damage on the basis of widely unsubstantiated claims of waste fraud and abuse, is the beneficiary of one of the biggest, shadiest subsidy deals of all time,” the two lawmakers, state Sen. BRAD HOYLMAN-SIGAL and Assemblymember MICAH LASHER, said in a statement.
Inside Elite Law Firms, Protests and Quitting After Trump Deals (NYT’s Matthew Goldstein, Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Michael S. Schmidt)
Head of African American Museum on leave as Smithsonian faces Trump pressure (WaPo’s Kriston Capps and Sophia Nguyen)
Miscarriage and Motherhood (The Atlantic’s Ashley Parker)
Buchanan could put down a glass of whiskey, to put it lightly. While he was a senator from Pennsylvania, Buchanan would buy his whiskey weekly, in 10-gallon quantities.
He bought it from local whiskey merchant JACOB BAER, which was known as “Old J.B. Whiskey.” Aside from the taste, Buchanan liked how he shared the same initials, according to his biographer, PHILIP KLEIN.
A CALL OUT! Do you think you have a harder trivia question? Send us your best one about the presidents, with a citation or sourcing, and we may feature it!
Edited by Noah Bierman, Jennifer Haberkorn, Isabel Dobrin and Kaitlyn Locke.
