Vance discusses Elon Musk and the economy in NBC News interview
Vice President JD Vance acknowledged Friday that Elon Musk has made “mistakes” in a wide-ranging interview with NBC News.
WASHINGTON — Vice President JD Vance acknowledged Friday that Elon Musk has made “mistakes” while executing mass firings of federal employees and emphasized that he believes there are “a lot of good people who work in the government.”
“Elon himself has said that sometimes you do something, you make a mistake, and then you undo the mistake. I’m accepting of mistakes,” Vance said in an interview with NBC News.
“I also think you have to quickly correct those mistakes. But I’m also very aware of the fact that there are a lot of good people who work in the government — a lot of people who are doing a very good job. And we want to try to preserve as much of what works in government as possible, while eliminating what doesn’t work.”
Vance’s gentler tone represented a contrast from the chainsaw approach that Musk, the world’s wealthiest man, has taken as he leads President Donald Trump’s initiative to slash federal spending and reorient the federal bureaucracy. The firings of thousands of government employees has been the centerpiece of Musk’s work over the first seven weeks of Trump’s second White House administration, with the cuts yielding lawsuits and pushback from judges. Musk has broadly characterized federal workers as "fraudsters" who can’t be trusted to do their jobs.
“I think some people clearly are collecting a check and not doing a job,” Vance said when asked about such comments from Musk. “Now, how many people is that? I don’t know, in a 3 million-strong federal workforce, whether it’s a few thousand or much larger than that.”
Rating: 5