JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Elon Musk, the unelected, unconfirmed, unofficial, but extremely powerful prime minister of the United States, is carrying out his plan to purge thousands of employees from the federal government, even as his putative supervisor, President Donald Trump, identifies new assignments for federal officials, including occupying and rebuilding the Gaza Strip, next.

Good evening and welcome to Washington Week.

The important thing in moments like these is to pay attention to what those in power do, not what they say.

America is not actually going to occupy the Gaza Strip and turn it into the Riviera of the Middle East any time soon, nor is it going to go to war with Denmark over Greenland.

This week, however, the Trump administration launched an attempt to neuter both the Federal Election Commission and the National Archives, the nonpartisan repository of, among other things, official White House records, and began dismantling America's counterintelligence capabilities.

And it's tearing through federal bureaucracies at a remarkable clip.

We'll separate the signal from the noise tonight with Anne Applebaum, my colleague and a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Eugene Daniels is the Chief Playbook and White House Correspondent at Politico.

Asma Khalid is a White House Correspondent at NPR and a political contributor for ABC News.

And Michael Scherer is a recent addition to The Atlantic's team of White House Correspondents.

Welcome, Michael.

MICHAEL SCHERER, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: Thank you, Jeff.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: You're welcome.

I'm glad to have you, glad to see you at the table.

So, look, I don't want to spend a great deal of time on it, but let me start with Gaza, if I may.

This is what a bit of what Donald Trump said the other day about Gaza.

Let's just listen.

DONALD TRUMP, U.S. President: We have an opportunity to do something that could be phenomenal, and I don't want to be cute.

I don't want to be a wise guy, but the Riviera of the Middle East, this could be something that could be so -- this could be so magnificent.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: So, I want to make sure that I'm not wrong.

American troops, Asma, are never going to go to Gaza and move all the people out so that they can build luxury high rises.

Is that fair?

ASMA KHALID, White House Correspondent, NPR: The president affirmed this week.

He did say that he has no intention of sending us troops to Gaza.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: How is he going to build the luxury high rises?

ASMA KHALID: In his view, Israel will hand over Gaza and the United States would be involved, I guess, in some sort of real estate situation.

But, look, I mean, you have to deal with the fact that there are, what, 1.5, 2 million Palestinians living there right now.

There's no sense of where they will go.

It's, you know, you could argue very unethical, immoral to move people.

But also it's not legal for the United States to occupy another country, another sovereign territory.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Even if you're building luxury high rises?

But the other part that I don't understand, and the administration hasn't talked about this, there's still Hamas, which is an Islamist militant organization that obviously invaded Israel a year-and-a-half ago, almost, and set off this latest conflagration that led to all the destruction in Gaza.

So, there's no thought about how do you convince the thousands of armed men of Hamas?

ASMA KHALID: They haven't explained any of that, no.

I mean, this is President Trump, a real estate man, who enlisted his Middle East envoy, also a real estate man, to go about, create some sort of real estate vision that he has for this region.

But, no, there's a lot of unanswered questions about what this would actually mean.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Can I ask all the White House correspondents at the table?

When you follow up privately or publicly, but mainly privately with administration officials and say, so what are you going to do about Hamas, how does this administration handle your questions?

EUGENE DANIELS, White House Correspondent, POLITICO: I mean, they usually say we have nothing to add to what the president said, right?

Like that's usually what we get.

I had a similar situation with that today and yesterday where I asked for a little bit more information on what he was saying.

Today, he said he hadn't talked to Zelenskyz, and he wasn't talking to him next week.

And so we were basically asking, wait, does he mean he's not meeting with him or he's not speaking with Zelenskyy again?

And they said, we don't have anything to add.

And what that tells us is that they don't know either, right.

And then they hope to, you hope to, it goes up the chain and comes back down, but sometimes it doesn't because things move so fast, right?

Like the Gaza thing happened earlier this week and the White House hasn't talked about it.

MICHAEL SCHERER: There is a functioning process in the White House and this White House is actually better than it was in 2017 that follows a normal course.

Like everyone looks at what the piece of paper is going to say.

The piece of paper says it.

Then there's this different category of things that the president just does.

And they are not -- I mean, coming out of the campaign, Susie Wiles learned very well.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: The chief of staff.

MICHAEL SCHERER: The chief of staff.

There's something -- you don't have to get in the way of that moving train and stop it you just let things happen and then you deal with it afterwards And I think this is one of those situations.

Practically, like you said, Gaza is not going to be a Riviera, but from what he has done, which is a huge win for a certain section of the Israeli government, is turn American policy from two-state solution, which has always been the policy, you know, for, whatever, 30 years now to, oh, well, maybe there won't be Palestinians in Gaza in the future.

And I think what that has done -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: So shifts the Overton window of the discussion.

MICHAEL SCHERER: Shift the window, the whole discussion.

And it has empowered a section of the Israeli government that was frowned upon by the American government.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Well, Anne, let me ask you this.

What's the harm -- okay, so there's never been a solution to Gaza, Egyptian occupation, Israeli endless occupation, turning it over to the Palestinian Authority, they lose it to Hamas, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

What's the harm of Donald Trump going out there and floating seemingly random idea that at least gets a discussion going?

ANNE APPLEBAUM, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: So, there's no harm in getting the discussion going, and there's no harm in looking for alternatives, and that's what presidents and prime ministers and diplomats should be doing.

But I don't think that's quite what Trump is doing.

You know, a lot of what he does, and this is very hard, especially for foreigners to understand, is just performance.

You know, it's got a Dada-esque quality.

You know, it's let's just say a thing that I came into my head, or let's -- you know, let me riff on something somebody just said to me, and then let's see what happens.

I mean, he did that with Greenland as well.

It was almost exactly the same process.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.

I mean, Asma, when you -- I mean, you've been in the White House all week.

It seemed as if the Israeli prime minister was also kind of new to this information when he was standing there at the press conference.

ASMA KHALID: He made some facial expressions.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes, he was kind of just trying to absorb it in real time, which is not normal.

ASMA KHALID: Yes.

I mean, I do think, as you said, Michael, it does shift the realm of possibility that Israeli society perhaps wants, and certainly Netanyahu would also want.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes, he likes this conversation.

ASMA KHALID: But I would say, you know, I think that the big question here, and the question that nobody has really dealt with, I think, or even heard that much from, is, again, there are, you know, 1.5, 2 million, say, Palestinians living here.

To me, the conversation's really different, even if it's just tactical, from Greenland, because there are people living on a land that you would, ultimately, he is suggesting, have to move somewhere.

He hasn't said how that would happen, if this would be done through force, or how it could sort of -- how he could entice them from moving.

And I would say that this is a -- I mean, what he is proposing is It's to me just completely, I would argue, immoral.

It's not something that happens.

It's illegal.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: You can't just do that.

You can't shift populations.

ASMA KHALID: You can't do this.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: It's against international law.

It would be de facto ethnic cleansing.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: But let me just -- I'll put a pin on this for later, but, Asma, is there any chance that something real happens out of this, or is this going to be like the Denmark, Greenland -- ASMA KHALID: I mean, I think the challenge with covering Trump is, I think, that things that seem out of the realm of possibility, seem completely implausible.

There are elements of it that actually end up happening, right?

And I think we're already seeing this in just the first two weeks of his presidency.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Like what?

ASMA KHALID: Oh, gosh, all sorts of things.

I mean, I did a story, for example, on Schedule F, which was something that he put in place.

This was around civil servants and ensuring that the civil service batch, you know, employees of the federal government would be more loyal to the president, easier to fire, right, traditional civil service workers.

I did a story about how the Biden administration had set up a rule to try to make this much more difficult to do.

Lo and behold, he comes in and he found another way, many ways, I would argue, to politicize the federal workforce, to decimate the federal workforce.

And so when I look at Trump, I think there are ideas that he is able to construe that are outside of the realm of normal people's imagination to ultimately get to goals that he wants.

EUGENE DANIELS: Because he's just -- it's just about testing the boundaries, right?

Like it is the same thing with renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, right?

ASMA KHALID: It happened.

EUGENE DANIELS: Everyone said that, oh, that's crazy, he's not going to do that.

And then you started seeing actual maps, people that do the maps on our phone say, we're changing the name to the Gulf of America, right?

And so that changes the output, you know, Gaza in that same category, where is the thing that he said exactly going to happen or is that is it changing the conversation?

Is it -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: But to be fair, changing the name -- you could call Gaza Palm Beach East and leave everybody there.

I'm sure he can get the map changed, but this is -- you're talking about moving 2 million people is not in the -- I'm just noting that this is in the realm of the thoroughly -- ASMA KHALID: I don't think it's in the realm of possibility But I think there are so many things that Trump has done, I would say, just in the past two weeks, but even in the four years prior that seemed out of the realm of possibility, and he weirdly what moves the -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Well, let's go to -- let me go to Palm Beach Extremely East, I guess that would be like 6,000 miles east.

Let me go to something that actually is happening, which is that USAID, the United States Aid, International Aid Agency, 10,000 employees, $40 billion distributed every year, basically shut down by Elon Musk, who is not, as I noted at the top of the show, elected, confirmed by the Senate.

It's just a guy who's been given the keys apparently.

So, USAID is the foremost expression of American soft power in the world.

Here's what Musk tweeted.

I thought this was remarkable when you're talking about people's jobs and lives.

We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.

Could gone, could have gone to some great parties, did that instead.

I mean, you know, put aside the 10,000 people who work there.

This is an organization that distributes food aid and medical aid in the billions.

What does this all mean, Eugene?

Untrammeled power?

EUGENE DANIELS: Essentially, right?

You know, I was at the press conference today with the Japanese prime minister and Trump and he was asked about DOGE, he was asked about Elon Musk.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: DOGE being the Department of Government Efficiency.

EUGENE DANIELS: It's not a government agency, but it is some kind of group that is getting the keys to the kingdom to go around and see these different agencies kind of rifle through things and seemingly do whatever they want.

And the question was to him, to President Trump, is there anything that you're telling Elon Musk not to do?

Is there a line that you're telling him not to cross, something to for him to not go into?

He basically said, no.

He said, you know, I'm telling him to go.

You know, we are he said a government and we should be open and all of those things should happen.

And when it comes to intel, maybe he said, I will get into it.

But other than that, he is allowing a long leash for Elon Musk and all of the seemingly young people who are working for him to be able to do that.

That is something that is extremely abnormal and I think a lot of people in this country never thought would happen, even when Trump talked about DOGE.

And it's another one of those things, the conversation started and now it's actually happening.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: It started as a joke, right.

Yes, when the first -- when it was like, oh, a crypto joke, basically.

MICHAEL SCHERER: I mean, I think that tweet points to, this is a lot of theater, and this is round one.

I mean, there was a judge today who put a temporary stop on the elimination of USAID.

He's going to have hearings early next week.

We don't know where the courts are going to come in.

We know right now Republicans have their tail between their legs up on the Hill, but that doesn't mean that when appropriations come down in a few months, a lot of these programs are very popular.

Like there are coalitions in Congress for these programs.

And then on top of that, there's the bigger question, which is hanging over all of this, which is what is the constitutional power of a president to not spend money that Congress appropriates.

This is appropriated money.

This is a -- Congress created this organization.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Congress makes laws and appropriates money.

MICHAEL SCHERER: And the Trump administration has a legal theory that the president can just not spend whatever he doesn't want to spend regardless of what Congress does.

Now, that's not what the law says.

There's a law from 1974, the Empowerment Act.

That's going to go to the Supreme Court.

So, we don't know where any of this is going at this point.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

MICHAEL SCHERER: But we do know there's a lot of strumming -- you know, like there are a lot of fireworks.

And Musk is out there.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.

Before we continue on USAID and the consequences of this, I just want you to listen to Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii, who said, had this to say about USAID.

SEN. BRIAN SCHATZ (D-HI): What I can tell you is that money is not flowing.

I can tell you that medicine is not being delivered.

I can tell you that there is medicine on the dock that was abandoned and spoiled.

All of those programs are either completely shut down or hobbled to the point where people can't deliver aid.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: So, let's talk about this, Anne.

What does USAID do?

And then I have a second question for you, which is what does it do specifically in the Ukraine context?

ANNE APPLEBAUM: So, to be clear, if USAID is destroyed, if it's not blocked by the courts, USAID is about 40 percent of all the humanitarian aid given in the world.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: By all countries?

ANNE APPLEBAUM: By all countries.

Also USAID has the thought leadership the technical ability to run aid programs at a large scale that nobody else has.

So, removing USAID means probably the collapse of food aid programs across Africa, probably the collapse of aid to help refugees.

USAID runs vaccination programs for children all over the world.

You know, it will mean children will not get polio vaccines.

I mean, there are literally -- I spoke to a former USAID senior leader this afternoon, who said to me, you know, there are children who get special malnutrition feedings, so children who are dying of starvation, who get packages of food every day given to them by USAID.

If this is cut off, all of those children will die.

So, this is a very, very serious change.

It will have a huge impact.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: And what does it mean specifically in the Ukraine context?

ANNE APPLEBAUM: So Ukraine is a country that's at war, and USAID plays a huge role in Ukraine also in ways that people probably don't know.

So, for example, it has a role in restarting the Ukrainian energy grid.

You know, it has a role in helping Ukrainian farmers get back to work.

I mean, it provides seed and technology and so on.

So, USAID thinks not only in terms - - it's not just humanitarian aid, it also thinks more broadly about economics.

Ukraine plays a big role in world food production.

They want Ukrainian farmers to be back working.

USAID also gives a lot of money through small grassroots organizations.

That was a big change that was made there over the last few years.

So, there are a lot of small groups, small charities who survived partly thanks to USAID, not just in Ukraine, but all over the world.

So, this is going to be a devastating blow for tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people.

ASMA KHALID: There's something I think just very strange in this moment of seeing the world's richest man really sort of take a hatchet that will essentially take people who are already in the depths of poverty and, you know, increase starvation rates or increase hunger rates, which is likely what will happen if USAID is entirely cut off.

I think that the other point that I heard, I was talking to some folks at USAID this week, and one thing I heard from I guess you would call them a maybe former staffer in this moment, considering so much of them have been like, oh, exactly.

But this person said to me, you know, we realize that foreign aid is not something that a lot of people, maybe in the United States, pay a lot of attention to.

It is not really high on the bucket list of many Americans' priorities.

But they said what they are worried about is that this is a test case for how Trump views overall his presidential power.

And that what is happening at USAID will not be isolated.

And it could potentially be a test case for how he could engage his power in other agencies and institutions.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: You know, it's a test case for two things.

You're exactly right.

It's a test case for can agencies just be abolished with no without Congress having any say, but it's also a test case of cruelty.

You know, are Americans willing to accept a high level of cruelty and death just, you know, on the president's whim, on Elon Musk's whim?

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: But I have to ask, I mean, there are many documented cases of government waste, including in USAID.

I've covered countries where USAID was not the most efficient deliverer of services.

Did they set themselves up in a kind of way?

Was there a kind of a laxity in the way that these things were administered that allowed this to happen, or is that just an unfair -- EUGENE DANIELS: I mean, I think when you have a bunch of humans doing one thing and the bigger the organization gets, there's always going to be some thing that is missed.

I think what we have not -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: This show, for instance.

EUGENE DANIELS: But what we've seen -- what we have not seen from Elon Musk or this administration is in the evidence of all of this abuse that they're talking about, right?

Like they say they've gone in, they found all of this waste that has been happening.

We haven't seen it.

I will say though, it matters -- it's a test case and it matters who or what organizations or groups of people push back.

We're not seeing a lot of pushback on the Hill, where there's absolute -- where they are supposed to have the power of the purse.

They created these organizations.

Republicans are not saying anything.

I've talked to many of them, Republicans.

Why do you think you don't have the power?

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Michael, why do you think that there will be some push?

You're intimating that there will be some pushback, maybe.

MICHAEL SCHERER: Well, I think there'll be legal pushback and there'll be appropriators pushback.

I don't know about political public pushback.

And I actually think what's been happening this week is that a lot of Democratic strategists have been warning Democrats not to make this their issue, because Democrats have to be saying we're making your lives better, voters.

And if they're seen as the party of defending a bureaucracy most people don't know about that helps people very far away, they're way off their message of you know eggs and butter.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: There are a lot of Christian groups and other grassroots groups in this country who spent a lot of time -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Catholic relief services, which a lot of -- MICHAEL SCHERER: The Democratic project right now is to find a way to win back the working class voters that were their voters for decades and they lost to Trump, and those voters, the people who don't vote very often, who deliver Trump the popular vote, are not in that group.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: We've come a long way from the idealism of the JFK inaugural.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: We've come a long way from George W. Bush, who created PEPFAR.

This is the organization that has solved essentially the AIDS crisis.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right, through the mechanisms of USAID, the State Department, and so on.

Let me go to an issue that we kind of alluded to before.

There have been many sudden changes in the way government has done business this week.

Elon Musk just this evening is tweeting about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

He says it's RIP, which is again a congressionally mandated creation.

And it seems as if people in Congress, Republicans in Congress, are not structurally fulfilling their oversight role.

Here's what Speaker Johnson said when he was asked about this.

REP. MIKE JOHNSON (R-LA): The executive branch of government in our system has the right to evaluate how executive branch agencies are operating.

That's what they're doing, by putting a pause on some of these agencies and by evaluating them, by doing these internal audits.

That is a long overdue, much welcomed development.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: So not to get all schoolhouse rock here or anything, but in our system, Congress is supposed to monitor and be a check on the executive, we have a system that's been -- that was devised a long time ago and it seemed to work.

Congress is supposed to be very vigorous in overseeing the way the executive branch operates, not deferring to the executive branch to decide how it operates.

So, what am I missing here?

Why aren't they interested in power?

EUGENE DANIELS: Well, I mean, the interesting thing that Johnson kept saying was evaluate.

That's not what's happening here, right?

Sure, I don't think anyone would have a problem with the branch looking into and talking to the people that work there and say, is there waste, fraud and abuse here?

That's not what's happening.

They're destroying things and talking about them and eliminating them.

And Congress, Republicans in Congress that I've talked to, many of them are hoping, fingers crossed, that they don't have to take on this fight and that this will be taken care of through the courts.

And I think that -- one, that's sometimes a fool's errand, depending on how the -- where these cases go through, but also, that is not what the Constitution tells them to do.

They are supposed to be there to check on this.

ASMA KHALID: But if I can say, the courts have been, I think, one of the only places that we're seeing any pushback to anything we're seeing.

I mean, if you look at the federal freeze on broad funding, that was a court case.

You look at the federal workers, that's a deferred resignation program, court case, birthright citizenship, court case.

I mean, that's the only place you're seeing any pushback.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: But, traditionally, legislators are interested in exercising their power over the executive branch.

This is just an unusual situation.

You've written a lot about the impulses that cause people to go along with things that they know structurally they shouldn't necessarily be going along with.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: So, we're now at a really weird moment in history where powerful U.S. senators who are elected for six years, who have huge staffs and money and great futures ahead of them if they leave the Senate at the Harvard Kennedy School or, you know, on television, are more cowardly than unnamed USAID bureaucrats, several of whom have done very brave things in the last few days, who've tried to stop orders, even knowing they would lose their jobs.

And the only conclusion I can come to is that they are all terrified, and they're afraid of Twitter, they're afraid of Musk, they're afraid of their constituents, they're afraid of threats of violence that they get against their families.

This is a very, very strange moment in U.S. politics where we have, you know, members of Congress elected politicians who are afraid to speak their minds and afraid to do their jobs.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Michael, I want to end with you and talk about, again, it's been -- the cliche is the fire hose this week.

You just broke a story with Ashley Parker earlier today about the Kennedy Center.

Donald Trump is taking over the Kennedy Center.

MICHAEL SCHERER: Yes.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: He wants to be the chairman of the board.

What's going on and what does it mean?

MICHAEL SCHERER: So, I think it fits into a broader pattern.

If you remember the first few months of 2017, Donald Trump arrived in Washington not knowing anybody and not really knowing what he wanted to do.

He had a bunch of slogans.

He had like a vague sense, but he didn't have personnel who liked him even, and he couldn't execute on anything.

This is a Donald Trump coming in who spent literally four years working with think tanks, writing E.O.s, preparing for this moment.

And what he's doing with the Kennedy Center is what he's been doing in other parts of the government as well.

He basically was shunned by the Kennedy Center in 2017.

He's the only president since the Kennedy Center started doing Kennedy Center honors in the late 70s, who's never been to the building.

And I think it embarrassed him.

Artists rebelled against the first term of President Trump, so he's going to take it over.

And he's showing some muscle.

But it's part of -- you know, there's so many places right now in government where he knows exactly what he's doing and he has a way of actually executing it.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: He's putting RFK Jr., trying to put him in the cabinet.

He's taking over the Kennedy Center.

It's almost as if he's glomming on to the name and the luster of the establishment.

MICHAEL SCHERER: Oh, he loves the sheen of Bobby Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard.

That's another thing he's doing.

He's building this coalition, the Republican coalition.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

Well, I'm sorry to say we have to leave it there for now.

I want to thank our panelists for an excellent conversation.

I want to thank our viewers at home for joining us.

For more of Michael and his colleague Ashley Parker's reporting on Trump's interest in the arts, please visit theatlantic.com.

I'm Jeffrey Goldberg.

Good night from Washington.