Elon Musk and President Donald Trump, publicly at least, are on good terms.
Yet when it comes to the staff in and around the new administration, it’s a different story. Just two-and-a-half weeks into Trump’s second term in office, a fissure has begun to emerge following Musk’s DOGE takeover of the US government, according to a half-dozen Trump loyalist Republican aides and advisers inside and around the administration who spoke with WIRED.
“I think it’s more the staff who have an issue with Elon than President Trump,” a Republican aide familiar with the discussions around DOGE and the administration tells WIRED. This staffer, like others, requested anonymity to relay sensitive conversations due to fears of retaliation.
In the space of a couple of weeks, Elon Musk and his associates have taken control of multiple government agencies, and a cadre of young and inexperienced engineers with ties to Musk have been given access to some of the most highly sensitive federal systems through DOGE. As Musk’s associates tore through the federal apparatus over the first weekend of February, a ride-or-die MAGA Republican operative who knows President Trump personally confided something to WIRED they never thought they’d find themselves saying before the past two weeks.
“There could be a collision course coming here at some point,” they said when asked if there’s a brewing freak-out over Musk in Trumpworld. “He’s getting too big for his breeches.”
The motivations of the people WIRED has spoken with cover a wide range. Some Trump campaign veterans hope White House chief of staff Susie Wiles will intervene, while other Republican operatives think the emerging rift is a problem despite having no personal animosity toward Musk. Others stand to gain personally or professionally from a Musk ouster.
Beyond increasing frustration over Musk causing headaches for the administration—which many of these Republicans consider to be more optics issues than full-blown policy disasters—the Republicans who spoke to WIRED had little to no idea what the proper chain of communication is supposed to be between agencies and the White House.
On Tuesday, Trump went on Fox News to declare that the new DOGE staffers were actually working in the White House, even though he said he hasn’t seen them. Minutes prior, a senior White House official told WIRED that “DOGE is part of the White House” now. (Confusingly, Trump established DOGE by repurposing the existing US Digital Service as the US DOGE Service, an agency under the Office of Management and Budget, via executive order.)
The Trump White House official said DOGE checks in with them “every day.” Yet when asked about the nature of these briefings and if they could offer any specifics as to whether they take place on a schedule or with early morning priority, a common practice for those tasked with liaising between agencies and the White House, they had none.
The DOGE briefings are “as needed,” the senior White House official said.
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What distinguishes this staff-level discontent from the grumblings during the transition about Musk’s proximity to and influence over Trump at Mar-a-Lago is that actual policy decisions are being made—so many and so fast that it’s hard for even the president’s most loyal foot soldiers to keep track.
While the staff’s qualms with Musk are rather straightforward, nobody seems to know how to handle the high-velocity and high-volume nature of the DOGE government takeover.
“Listen, when the process is going this fast, from extreme outsiders, the communication is bound to be a mess,” says Matthew Bartlett, a Republican operative and former State Department official under Trump in his first term. Bartlett says the rest of Washington is getting their first real taste of the Silicon Valley–influenced attitudes driving much of the private sector, now in the form of twentysomethings from DOGE appearing on government calls.
“I mean, listen, this goes to the old adage of Steve Jobs … finding you in the elevator and saying, give me 10 seconds to tell me what you do, and justify your job,” Bartlett claims. “That is legendary stuff in the private sector—and maybe it worked—but, there are so many nuances to government that it makes addressing and making wide, sweeping changes highly problematic.”
Republicans who landed administration jobs aren’t exactly shocked a possible rift is emerging. “Can’t say a lot of that surprises me to hear,” an administration source familiar with the discussions tells WIRED. Sources say many people have turned to Wiles as one of the only people who could even attempt to reign in Musk.
“Some of it is, she’s gotta balance being the gatekeeper to the president and having Musk kinda going rogue on a lot of this stuff,” says the second Republican operative familiar with the discussions. “I think she’s very smart and very talented, and very loyal to President Trump, so she’ll think about how to navigate that best.”
That, of course, depends heavily on her boss’s desire for any sort of gatekeeping or insulation from the possible looming Musk implosion many of these Republicans are bracing for.
“I’m just hearing the president is entirely enthusiastic about his efforts, and they are working together very closely,” a source close to Trump who speaks with the president regularly told WIRED. “And that comes from someone at the very top. Not him, but someone under him.”
Without any tacit approval to step out in front of the boss, the staff are left with no other viable options to express their reservations about how Musk has been operating.
Trump’s own awareness of what DOGE is up to appeared to be in question after his Oval Office news conference on Tuesday.
Shortly after he suggested that the federal government should deploy the young DOGE staffers as air traffic controllers—“We should use some of them in the control towers, where we were putting people that were actually intellectually deficient,” the president said—the same senior White House official quickly dismissed the comment as a serious proposal.
“Lmfao no,” the White House official told WIRED in a text message. “You guys need to learn how to cover him. He was making the point that smart bright people need to be ATC’s [sic.].”
Trump simultaneously suggested the DOGE staffers are young and “very smart,” but also that “some are young, and some are not young. Some are not young at all.” He has also insisted everything is fine around Musk’s role in the administration, and that the billionaire “can’t do and won’t do” anything “without our approval.”
Several Republicans in and around the Trump administration declined to speak on the record about Musk, with one GOP operative summarizing the dynamic as too hot to touch.
“Off the record—yeah, I’ve heard about some of this. But, look, as of now, I’m gonna keep out of the space between the world’s richest man and the world’s most powerful man,” a Republican operative in Trumpworld told WIRED in an encrypted message, followed by a smiley face emoji. (This Republican later agreed to let WIRED use this quote under the condition of anonymity.)
“I have to believe a lot of this is a performance by people who are worried about getting fired,” a Trump adviser said of the staff’s patience wearing thin with the world’s richest man.
The dynamic between Trump’s loyal aides and Musk, already riddled with varying degrees of mistrust over Musk bringing in his own people, is made all the more complicated by the X owner’s relationship with Florida governor Ron DeSantis’ entourage. Musk’s ongoing work with the firm Pathway Public P2 Affairs, which is staffed by several alumni of the DeSantis campaign, continues to irk MAGA loyalists who thought DeSantis’ allies would be frozen out of the consulting space after Trump’s victory. Now, they’re in “these positions of influence … especially with Musk,” says the second Republican operative. This is a particularly fraught dynamic when it comes to Wiles, who was iced out by DeSantis after she helped him become governor of Florida.
“There’s concern about Musk and others being involved with people who went to the mat for Ron DeSantis and spent hundreds of millions of dollars against Donald Trump,” they later added, after claiming the collision course with Musk could happen sooner than expected.
There were also several Trump advisers ready to go on the record to publicly bash Musk for what they considered to be his bungled get-out-the-vote effort through America PAC after the general election, should Trump have lost. WIRED reported extensively on the working conditions of door knockers for contractors for America PAC, including a group of canvassers in Michigan who were driven around in the back of a seatless U-Haul moving van and threatened to have their pay and lodging withheld if they did not hit their quotas for Blitz Canvassing, a subcontractor for Musk’s PAC.
“Operatives that really know what’s going on, people want an audit of America PAC for the sake of America First,” a Republican operative tells WIRED.
Some of these Republicans, it seems, want a DOGE for Musk’s outside political operation. “The point is, who is auditing?” says the second Trumpworld operative.
What’s most notable about these Republicans reaching the limit of their patience with Musk is that for the most part, they were pretty big fans until recent weeks.
“I think people have been very annoyed by it,” said the Republican who wants an audit of America PAC. “And I mean, look, I think Elon’s really important. Everyone’s grateful. It’s just sort of an unnecessary situation.”