“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.”
