Vice President J.D. Vance says Elon Musk has made some “mistakes” in firing thousands of federal workers but that “I’m accepting of mistakes.”
“Elon himself has said that sometimes you do something, you make a mistake, and then you undo the mistake,” Vance said in a wide-ranging interview with NBC News published on Friday.
“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,” the vice president added.
“And we want to try to preserve as much of what works in government as possible, while eliminating what doesn’t work.”
Musk last week told Republican lawmakers that he is not to blame for the firings and said that those decisions are left to various federal agencies.
“Elon doesn’t fire people,” said Rep. Richard Hudson, R-N.C., after a dinner-time pizza meeting with Musk in the basement of the Capitol.
“He doesn’t have hiring and firing authority,” added Hudson, who leads the House Republicans’ campaign arm. “The president’s empowered him to go uncover this information, that’s it.”
President Donald Trump said in early March that he had instructed department secretaries to work with DOGE but to “be very precise” about which workers will stay or go — using a “‘scalpel’” he said in a social media post “rather than the ‘hatchet.”
“I don’t want to see a big cut where a lot of good people are cut,“ Trump later told reporters in the Oval Office.