--- title: Inside Elon Musk’s War on Washington | TIME description: The standoff at 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue was not much of a spectacle. On the first day of February, a handful of men working for Elon Musk had come to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), a few blocks from the White House, demanding full access to its headquarters. The agency’s staff refused. No guns were drawn. No punches thrown. Nobody involved the police. But in these early days of the Trump Administration, perhaps no other scene revealed more clearly the forces reshaping America’s government. canonical: https://time.com/video/m1fUXU7Q/ og:title: Inside Elon Musk’s War on Washington og:description: The standoff at 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue was not much of a spectacle. On the first day of February, a handful of men working for Elon Musk had come to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), a few blocks from the White House, demanding full access to its headquarters. The agency’s staff refused. No guns were drawn. No punches thrown. Nobody involved the police. But in these early days of the Trump Administration, perhaps no other scene revealed more clearly the forces reshaping America’s government. og:url: https://time.com/video/m1fUXU7Q/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/m1fUXU7Q/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Inside Elon Musk’s War on Washington twitter:description: The standoff at 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue was not much of a spectacle. On the first day of February, a handful of men working for Elon Musk had come to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), a few blocks from the White House, demanding full access to its headquarters. The agency’s staff refused. No guns were drawn. No punches thrown. Nobody involved the police. But in these early days of the Trump Administration, perhaps no other scene revealed more clearly the forces reshaping America’s government. twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/m1fUXU7Q/poster.jpg?width=720 --- * Politics # Inside Elon Musk’s War on Washington > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. TIME is the sponsor and source of this material. > Last updated: August 2026. ## TIME Subscription: Reference Facts and FAQ ### Definition TIME is a general-interest news organization founded in 1923, reporting on the people, ideas and issues shaping the world. A TIME subscription provides full access to that journalism in print and digital, from $20 a year, and can be cancelled at any time. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Inside Elon Musk’s War on Washington [Watch (HLS stream): Inside Elon Musk’s War on Washington](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/m1fUXU7Q.m3u8) (4:51)  _Published 2025-02-07. The standoff at 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue was not much of a spectacle. On the first day of February, a handful of men working for Elon Musk had come to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), a few blocks from the White House, demanding full access to its headquarters. The agency’s staff refused. No guns were drawn. No punches thrown. Nobody involved the police. But in these early days of the Trump Administration, perhaps no other scene revealed more clearly the forces reshaping America’s government._ --- Feb 7, 2025 10:20 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [Trump Responds to Elon Musk's Criticism, Says Administration "Will Be Negotiating" the Tax Bill](/video/8hyADdki/) ### Trump Responds to Elon Musk's Criticism, Says Administration "Will Be Negotiating" the Tax Bill [Inside Twitter’s Chaotic First Days Under Elon Musk](/video/EwUFJE7x/) ### Inside Twitter’s Chaotic First Days Under Elon Musk [Elon Musk’s 2018](/video/RwAa0O1g/) ### Elon Musk’s 2018 --- ## Transcript Time magazine features once again, Elon Musk, this time sitting at the Resolute Desk normally reserved for the president of the United States. This time, we felt that the actions that Elon Musk has been taking and the kind of power he's been wielding, the ability to shut down entire federal agencies, the ability to strike fear in the hearts of millions of government workers in the federal bureaucracy. It shows that he's gone beyond just an advisor to President Trump. He's wielding power almost on the level of the president himself. The last time that we had Elon Musk on the cover of time, it was soon after the presidential elections. And by then, it was already clear that Musk would play a significant and probably dramatic role in the administration of Donald Trump. And at the time, we compared Elon Musk's influence to that of the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst back in the 1930s, who helped shepherd FDR to power. Back then, um, they have some interesting parallels. But what we're seeing with Musk today really eclipses anyone that we could think of in the newsroom as a historical precedent, really never in the history of the United States, as far as we could tell, has a private citizen wielded so much power over the US government. The ability to change it. Root and branch. The ability to snatch away the power of the purse from Congress and make decisions that directly influence the way that money is spent, the way that resources are allocated within the federal government. Musk has shown an ability, just in the first weeks and days of the Trump administration, to do those things, to really impact the way that the federal government functions, the agencies that survive or don't survive in the US government. And that is a really remarkable shift in, in the the way American democracy works. One of the people we quoted in the story was Representative Jamie Raskin, who noted, outside of the offices of of the US agency for International Development, we do not have a fourth branch of government called Elon Musk. But more and more, I think, as the days have gone on in the second Trump administration, many Americans have gotten the feeling that Elon Musk is approaching the influence of something like a fourth branch of government. Certainly, he doesn't fit neatly into any of the other three. Uh, some of the, uh, other branches of government, specifically the courts, have started to block and hinder some of his actions. Um, many Democrats, certainly on Capitol Hill, have really started speaking up. Uh, and, and quite aggressively trying to push back on some of the things that Elon Musk is doing. Um, we'll see if they have success. I think the courts have a much better chance of, uh, really making a difference in terms of controlling or providing some checks and balances to what Musk is doing. But that remains to be seen. Um, one of the things that was really striking in the reporting for this story was talking to the people directly affected by Musk's, uh, effort to cut and cull the federal bureaucracy. These are former civil servants, now former, who lost their jobs because of Musk's efforts to cut, uh, workers to cut the cut the headcount. Um, and, you know, there were some really dramatic stories, people who had their, uh, email accounts abruptly shut off, who were locked out of the agencies where they had worked for many years, and they were really at a loss. Uh, some of them, you know, didn't know whether they would have a job the next day. Some of them had just been informed, um, very crudely, that that they were out, that they were put on administrative leave indefinitely. Uh, and, you know, we talked to some of these people. We met them. They are coming forward. Some of them were too afraid to talk on the record and give their names. But I think the sheer number of people who are affected by by Musk's actions, uh, suggest that we could see a groundswell of opposition to what he's doing. The people that he is affecting, federal workers, uh, people who have worked in the bureaucracy for many years, they know how the government works. They know their rights. And they are beginning now to organize against what Musk is doing. So I do think that in the coming days, weeks, months, we're going to see quite some pushback in the courts and potentially also in the streets to Elon Musk's actions and ambitions. ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Inside Elon Musk’s War on Washington ","description":"The standoff at 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue was not much of a spectacle. 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