Elon Musk may have become the Mar-a-Lago guest who won’t leave, but president-elect Donald Trump apparently has no plans to send him home.
“He likes this place—I just can’t get him out of here,” Trump said in a speech Tuesday at his resort in Florida. “And I like having him here. He’s good. He’s done a fantastic job.”
Musk has been a near-constant fixture at Mar-a-Lago since he poured $200 million into the incoming president’s successful re-election bid and jumped around for him non-stop on stage on the campaign trail.
The tech tycoon has been golfing and dining with Trump, sitting in on meetings, advising on personnel matters, traveling to Washington, D.C., and even meeting with foreign officials. Members of Trump’s transition team have likened him to a guest who won’t leave after the party ends.
The billionaire owner of social media platform X has also been tapped to co-head a government efficiency “department” with Vivek Ramaswamy that will supposedly identify $2 trillion in wasteful government spending—a plan that even conservative economists have called a “fantasy.”
On Tuesday, Trump offered new insight into the “department,” which has raised a number of eyebrows given that only Congress can create a new department—and that the world’s richest man would need to divest from his business interests to run it.
In fact, Trump and Ramaswamy will oversee a panel that will “provide advice and guidance from outside of government” about how to reduce spending and restructure federal agencies, Trump said Tuesday.
“They will be coming in with individual reports and a big one at the end,” the president-elect said in his speech at Mar-a-Lago Thursday, offering the first new detail about what the panel will do since it was announced.
Congress will then be free to ignore those reports. But at least they will give the president some ammunition for getting rid of career federal employees who aren’t deemed to be aggressive enough in implementing Trump’s agenda, according to Reuters.
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