Rachael Bade is POLITICO's Capitol bureau chief and senior Washington columnist. She is a former co-author of POLITICO Playbook and co-author of "Unchecked: The Untold Story Behind Congress's Botched Impeachments of Donald Trump." Her reported column, Corridors, illuminates how power pulses through Washington, from Capitol Hill to the White House and beyond.
President Donald Trump has told his inner circle, including members of his Cabinet, that Elon Musk will be stepping back in the coming weeks from his current role as governing partner, ubiquitous cheerleader and Washington hatchet man.
The president remains pleased with Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency initiative but both men have decided in recent days that it will soon be time for Musk to return to his businesses and take on a supporting role, according to three Trump insiders who were granted anonymity to describe the evolving relationship.
Musk’s looming exit comes as some Trump administration insiders and many outside allies have become frustrated with his unpredictability and increasingly view the billionaire as a political liability, a dynamic that was thrown into stark relief Tuesday when a conservative judge Musk vocally supported lost his bid for a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat by 10 points.
It also represents a shift in the Trump-Musk relationship from a month ago, when White House officials and allies were predicting Musk was “here to stay” and that Trump would find a way to blow past the 130-day time limit.
One senior administration official said Musk is likely to retain an informal role as an adviser and continue to be an occasional face around the White House grounds. Another cautioned that anyone who thinks Musk is going to disappear entirely from Trump’s orbit is “fooling themselves.”
The transition, the insiders said, is likely to correspond to the end of Musk’s time as a “special government employee,” a special status that temporarily exempts him from some ethics and conflict-of-interest rules. That 130-day period is expected to expire in late May or early June.
Musk’s defenders inside the administration believe that the time will soon be right for a transition, given their view that there’s only so much more he can cut from government agencies without shaving too close to the bone.
But many other Trump allies say he’s an unpredictable, unmanageable force who has had issues communicating his plans with Cabinet secretaries and through the White House chain of command led by Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, frequently sending them into a frenzy with unexpected and off-message comments on X, his social-media platform — including sharing unvetted and uncoordinated plans to gut federal agencies.
That’s to say nothing of their concerns about Musk as a political liability who has served as a rallying point for fractured Democrats. In Wisconsin, Musk’s opponents seized on his millions of dollars of spending in the judicial race, with some openly calling it a referendum on the polarizing mogul.
Publicly, Trump has shown nothing but admiration for Musk, who spent millions to help elect him. He often touts the waste, fraud, and abuse DOGE claims to have identified, hailing Musk’s work as revolutionary.
But my colleague Sophia Cai reports that Trump is increasingly mindful of next year’s midterms and making sure he doesn’t jeopardize his House majority. He’s kept a careful eye on the town hall outrage over DOGE, even as Republicans have chalked those scenes up to coordinated liberal stagecraft.
Also telling, Cai notes: His discussions about next steps for Musk came just days before he grew so worried about the GOP’s narrow House margin that he withdrew New York Rep. Elise Stefanik’s nomination to be ambassador to the UN.
Trump had already started easing the glide path starting more than a week before the election — including at a March 24 Cabinet meeting where he told attendees that Musk would be transitioning out of the administration, according to one of the insiders, who did not attend the meeting but was briefed on the comments. A senior administration official confirmed Trump discussed Musk’s transition at the meeting.
Soon after, Trump invited reporters and cameras in for the tail end of the meeting, where he lavished praise on Musk, who attended the meeting wearing a red MAGA hat. Cabinet secretaries — many of whom had clashed with Musk just weeks before over Musk’s bull-in-a-china-shop approach to cutting their departments — in turn jumped in to hail his bureaucracy-slashing campaign.
“Elon, I want to thank you — I know you’ve been through a lot,” Trump said, mentioning death threats and the spate of vandalism directed at the cars built by Musk’s Tesla before calling him “a patriot” and “a friend of mine.”
Both men subsequently hinted publicly at a transition. When Fox News’ Bret Baier asked Musk on Thursday whether he’d be ready to leave when his special government employee status expires, he essentially declared mission accomplished: “I think we will have accomplished most of the work required to reduce the deficit by $1 trillion within that time frame.”
On Monday night, Trump told reporters that “at some point Elon’s gonna want to go back to his company,” adding: “He wants to. I’d keep him as long as I could keep him.”
“As the President said, this White House would love to keep Elon around for as long as possible,” White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said Tuesday as election results from Wisconsin rolled in. “Elon has been instrumental in executing the President’s agenda, and will continue this good work until the President says otherwise.”
After this story was first published Wednesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt referred to it as “garbage” in a social media post but did not dispute the reporting. She confirmed that “Elon will depart from public service as a special government employee when his incredible work at DOGE is complete.”
But many close to Trump are relieved that Musk is expected to soon move on from his central role at Trump’s side and that the litany of DOGE surprises — which have ranged from a weekend email blast demanding federal workers list their work output to accidental cuts to Ebola prevention programs — might finally be coming to a close.
The billionaire’s involvement has raised significant conflict-of-interest concerns given his companies’ extensive government contracts, though as a special government employee, his financial disclosure forms remain confidential.
The nearly shuttered USAID had initiated an investigation on agency oversight into Starlink terminals sent to Ukraine, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau was targeted nearly a week after publishing a rule that would put technology companies such as X – which was planning a partnership with Visa – in its crosshairs over regulation, and many other agency attacks.
Democrats have increasingly targeted Musk politically, most recently criticizing his over $20m investment in a Wisconsin supreme court race. The New Jersey senator Cory Booker broke the record for longest speech in Senate floor history after more than 24 hours assailing Trump and Musk.
There is a lot at stake
The world’s most powerful man is using his office to punish journalistic organisations that won’t follow his orders or who report critically on his policies. Donald Trump’s actions against the press include bans, lawsuits and hand-picking his own pool of reporters.
But the global threat against the press is bigger than just Trump.
Economic and authoritarian forces around the globe are challenging journalists’ ability to report. An independent press, one that those in power can’t simply overrule, is crucial to democracy. Figures such as Trump and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán want to crush it through exclusion and influence.
