MSNBS’s Morning Joe had a field day with Department of Government Efficiency Chief Elon Musk’s claim that his cuts have been “measured.”
“I do agree we actually want to be careful in the cuts,” Musk said on Fox News’s Special Report with Bret Baier on Thursday. “We want to measure twice, if not thrice, and cut once. That is our approach.”
Over on MSNBC, host Joe Scarborough appeared floored.
“This is the guy that had the chainsaw, you know?” he said, referring to the now-infamous incident of Musk wielding a chainsaw at the Conservative Political Conference in February to symbolize his cost-cutting spree.
“I mean, the biggest complaint that I think most people had early on—even [among those] that believed there was waste, fraud, and abuse in the government—was it was just so indiscriminate,“ Scarborough went on. ”And they were getting rid of people that were trying to stop the bird flu from becoming a pandemic, helping with nuclear safety—you go down the list."
“To act like this has been some well-thought-out, measured approach is just not believable,” he added.
Scarborough further suggested that Musk was trying to navigate the federal bureaucracy like a private company.
“Elon Musk has an approach that’s always worked for him: Just go into a company and break it, rebuild it in his image,” the host said. “I’m not comparing their approaches, but what works in government—and I learned this my first day in Washington, D.C.—is not what works in corporations."
“It’s why CEOs, time and time again, swagger into this city and, after six months, throw up their arms and go home,” he added.
