FRANKLIN FOER: Good evening and welcome to Washington Week.

I'm Franklin Foer.

Jeffrey Goldberg is away.

President Trump's move fast and break things approach to running the country may need some finessing, as evidenced this week by the trade war he started and just as abruptly ended, and by the reported confrontation at the White House between members of his own cabinet and Elon Musk.

Here to help us sort through Trump's week of whiplash are Dan Balz, the chief correspondent at The Washington Post, Eugene Daniels is the newly named senior Washington correspondent and co-host of The Weekend on MSNBC, Michelle Price is a White House reporter at the Associated Press, and Kayla Tausche is a senior White House correspondent for CNN.

So, Kayla, the big narrative of the first bit of the Trump administration, I think, has been the unimpeded power of Elon Musk.

And this time, for the first time, we have some evidence that there was this confrontation in the cabinet room between Musk and other members of the cabinet.

Take us into the room.

What happened?

KAYLA TAUSCHE, Senior White House Correspondent, CNN: Well, this had been something that was brewing for quite a long time when Elon Musk and his DOGE team went to shutter USAID, or as Elon said, feed it into the wood chipper, it really angered Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was supposed to have purview over USAID.

And conservatives had long wanted to make changes to the agency and to remake it in their image.

But many of them did not believe that the way to do it was to have to build it from the ground up and to end every single contract that the agency had under its belt.

So, that was one of the first straws that began to break the camel's back.

And then there was this heated confrontation, as reported by The New York Times, but I've learned in my own reporting that there are many cabinet officials who have been frustrated and who have been bristling at the way that Elon Musk has been operating and are taking some pleasure in the fact that he is only a special governmental employee, that he only does have 130 days to do this.

And they believe that he's trying to get in there and he's trying to move fast.

But I know of at least one who has a countdown app on their phone with the end of May because that's when his term as an SGE will end.

And so there is a view that he's coming in, he's trying to do this very quickly, but that their belief is that Trump will need to manage his relations with his cabinet far longer than he'll have to manage Elon Musk.

FRANKLIN FOER: But do you have a sense of why now?

Was there some sort of tipping point that caused this to kind of burst out in the way that it burst out?

KAYLA TAUSCHE: Well, I just think that these people have not really had an audience with each other in that way.

The first cabinet meeting was mostly on camera and was more about formalities and pleasantries.

This was really rolling up your sleeves, getting down to business, figuring out what each agency was cutting.

And I think that there's a belief that there are going to be many unintended consequences and that many of these secretaries are going to have to find out the hard way and live with those consequences and then potentially have to undo a lot of that work.

And that's what they were trying to get to the bottom of.

EUGENE DANIELS, Senior Washington Correspondent, MSNBC: And Musk has kind of been at the center of everything over the last, what, two and a half months.

FRANKLIN FOER: Yes.

EUGENE DANIELS: And so I think there's some frustration by the cabinet secretaries who are like, wait a second, I got sworn in, I came here, I'm in charge of an entire department of the government.

And when we're looking at that cabinet, when they're all standing around, Elon Musk is standing in front of us taking questions from the press.

He's taking questions from the press in the Oval Office.

So, there's some frustration there, because the questions that they have for Elon Musk is, why are you moving so fast?

As you said, they wanted to do a lot of these things already.

It's the speed and the chaos, and it's creating bad narratives around all of these agencies, and most importantly to these department heads.

It is creating bad feelings and morale within the agencies.

FRANKLIN FOER: So, according to Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, who broke the story in the Times, Elon Musk responded to the confrontation this way.

Elon aggressively defended himself, reminding the cabinet secretaries that he built multibillion dollar companies from ground up and knew something about hiring good people.

Michelle, based on everything you know about the dynamics in that room, how do you think that went down?

MICHELLE PRICE, White House Reporter, The Associated Press: I mean, this is an attitude that's dismissive of government.

These are - - a lot of these folks who are coming into these cabinet positions, some of them have served and they are taking it seriously, that they have these agencies under their control.

Some of them have real crises they are dealing with and trying to take on.

You know, we saw the reporting that Secretary Duffy was talking about we've had plane crashes and there's concerns about do we have enough air traffic controllers.

So, when you have these young people who have no government experience coming in and telling you to wholesale axe part of your team, it's going to ruffle some feathers.

But, you know, it's an extraordinary development.

Two weeks ago tonight, we had Elon on stage wielding a chainsaw and now we've got Trump saying we're going to go with a scalpel, FRANKLIN FOER: Right.

I want to read from that quote because just after that cabinet meeting Trump took to show Truth Social to kind of in somewhat sanitized form addresses.

He wrote, I've instructed the secretaries and leadership to work with DOGE on cost cutting measures and staffing.

They can be very precise to who will remain and who will go.

We say the scalpel rather than the hatchet.

Dan, so, is Trump just trying to bury some sort of territorial fight when he addresses this way, or does -- do you have a sense that Trump himself might believe that Musk is overreaching?

DAN BALZ, Chief Correspondent, The Washington Post: I suspect he thinks that he is overreaching a bit.

I mean, this is, you know, this isn't even a midcourse correction.

This is a very early course correction.

How significant it is, we'll have to wait and see.

I think he has to respond to the people he recruited in to run these agencies.

If they are that upset, he has to give them something.

But we'll see whether it really does rein in Musk or whether Musk will continue to carry it out.

I mean, Musk is a disruptor in the way that the president has wanted to be a disruptor.

And has he gone very, very fast and disrupted more than I think a lot of people thought?

Yes.

I mean, a Republican said to me this week, you know, that the American people did not vote for Elon Musk with a chainsaw.

They voted for some measure of disruption.

They think that government is too big and can be cut.

They think there is waste in government.

But the speed with which he's done it and kind of the recklessness with which he's done it, they've had to pull down things that they put up.

They've had to -- you know, people have been fired and then hired back in certain positions.

It's been sloppy in that way.

And I think that for Trump, if it begins to blow back on him, he's going to push back, and that's what he did this week.

MICHELLE PRICE: Well, what also was telling about what the president said in that message was that they're going to continue to have these meetings every two weeks.

This wasn't a one-off for him to appear before the cabinet.

They want a check-in.

That is some accounting that we just haven't had before.

We didn't even get to hear from Elon until a few weeks in.

You know, there was no public address of what he was actually doing with DOGE.

FRANKLIN FOER: Yes.

Do you have any sense of how Musk, who, you know, in previous instances in his career hasn't been known to countenance dissent in a kindly sort of way?

Do you have a sense of how he's responded to the outbursts against him?

KAYLA TAUSCHE: Well, certainly, defensively.

I mean, we've seen that in his own public responses to officials.

I mean, he has been effectively trolling some of these secretaries and some of these government officials on his own social media platform.

And so they're afraid of being on his bad side and then essentially getting ratioed by conservative media if he decides that he doesn't like them.

So, that's really been his bully pulpit and he has been no stranger to using it.

But one thing I think is really interesting is that there's accountability for these agencies but there so far has not really been any accountability for Elon Musk.

The White House has said that he would be his own cop on the beat, he would police his own conflicts.

We were also told that we would find out who had been financing the transition.

We still haven't learned any of that information.

And so there have been promises of accountability for Elon and his own team that have not been met so far, that I think there will be growing calls for.

FRANKLIN FOER: Dan?

DAN BALZ: The absence of transparency, I think, is a big factor in this.

They've been so reluctant to really reveal what they're doing.

I mean, they have tried to put some stuff up on the websites, but not to the degree that we all would like to know what it actually is.

They've thrown out, you know, snippets of things, anecdotal things.

But what it adds up to at this point still seems way short of kind of what they had promised that they would do.

FRANKLIN FOER: And fascinating, The New York Times, when they did their tally of all this, what we know based on what we can see, that it was federal employees and not contractors, like Musk, who've primarily been the targets of the cuts.

DAN BALZ: Yes.

FRANKLIN FOER: So, Eugene, moving forward, will it be the chainsaw or the scalpel?

EUGENE DANIELS: I think, unclear, maybe a hatchet, maybe right in the middle between the two of those.

I mean, I think what we're probably going to see, Elon being defensive, he is going to probably tinker with some of this a little bit faster and you're going to have it's going to the question is whether or not Donald Trump himself is going to start getting more and more frustrated.

We have said as reporters for weeks and weeks that there was going to -- this relationship was going to come to a head.

You have two alphas, two billionaires who see themselves as the center of attention, that TIME Magazine cover where you had Elon Musk sitting behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office, and then all of a sudden Donald Trump was pulling him in and saying, making it clear, like, I'm in charge here.

So, that part of the relationship is going to make it to whether we see a scalpel, a hatchet, a chainsaw moving forward.

FRANKLIN FOER: But we're not there yet.

EUGENE DANIELS: We're not there yet.

But it seems like we're getting there faster than the White House wanted us to think, right?

We kept getting pushback from the podium where they said, you know, all of you guys think that this is going to -- the relationship is going to -- they're going to have a breakup here.

And it seems like that's happening.

And it's not happening just because of two of them are having issues.

It's because the cabinet secretaries are having issues.

And also, and probably more importantly, Republican lawmakers have been calling the president themselves and saying, this is going too fast.

It's too messy.

And more importantly, the American people are starting to be really confused about what's going on.