Transcript: Stephen Miller Rages on CNN as Musk’s DOGE Lie Implodes

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the February 19 episode of The Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

On Tuesday, top White House adviser Stephen Miller unleashed a wild, angry rant on CNN after getting triggered by tough questioning from CNN’s anchor about Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency. This comes even as one of Musk’s silliest lies yet—the idea that he had found rampant fraud and Social Security—imploded rather spectacularly under basic scrutiny.

The through line here is that the great illusion that Musk, Donald Trump, Miller and others are trying to push—that they’re rooting out immense amounts of waste, fraud, and abuse in the government—is collapsing all around them, which shows how flimsy all the MAGA mythmaking has truly become. We’re talking today about all this with writer Jill Lawrence, who has a new piece for The Bulwark arguing that the Musk enterprise has revealed that the emperor really has no clothes. Two emperors, actually—Musk and Trump. Jill, thanks for coming on.

Jill Lawrence: Thanks for having me, Greg.

Sargent: Let’s start with Stephen Miller. He was getting questioned by CNN’s Brianna Keilar about some of the technical intricacies of various protections that civil servants enjoy. Then Miller just kind of rolled over the specifics, and this happened.

Stephen Miller (audio voiceover): Why are you not celebrating these cuts? If you agree there is waste, if you agree there is abuse, if you agree there is corruption, why are you not celebrating the cuts, the reforms that are being instituted every day that no action is taken? The entire salaries of American workers that are taxed disappear forever.

Brianna Keilar (audio voiceover): Stephen, let’s calm down. This is not ... We’re not having a debate about whether there are places ...

Miller (audio voiceover): You are trying to debate me, and I will be as excited as I want to be about the fact that we are saving Americans billions of dollars, that we are ending the theft and waste and grift and corruption, that we are stopping American taxpayer dollars from subsidizing a rogue federal bureaucracy.

Sargent: Jill, note how Keilar asked Miller to calm down, and then Miller just defaults to the same talking points about how Trump and Musk are finding all these great savings. If he just says it loud enough, it’ll be true. Your reaction to this?

Lawrence: Well, he was using words to really trash and slur the federal workforce. He was implying that everybody that they got rid of was due to corruption, theft, “the rogue federal bureaucracy,” and [that] they’re saving billions of dollars, when in fact what they’re doing is endangering federal programs. They’re endangering people in foreign countries working for the government. They’re endangering flights and aviation, public health. They’re doing this willy-nilly and they’re not having any discriminating evaluation, and they don’t really know how many people they’ve gotten rid of or how many people they need to get back because they suddenly realize [or] find out that these people were protecting nuclear weapons stockpiles or something like that.

It’s just completely crazy. And what’s backfiring is there are so many of these individual tales—including [of] people who don’t have electricity or medical care in foreign countries because they worked for USAID, and suddenly everything was cut off. There’s just no organization to it and no proof anywhere, no evidence that money is being saved or that these are functions that we shouldn’t have to support our government.

Sargent: Yeah. The problem that DOGE faces right now is that they’re not coming up with the goods. The other day, Elon Musk claimed that DOGE had found examples of 150-year-olds getting Social Security. This was repeated by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who said DOGE suspects that tens of millions of dead people are fraudulently getting Social Security payments. And this was all harshly debunked on Tuesday by, of all people, a pro-MAGA personality, Trish Regan, who noted that these payments aren’t actually going out. These just may be people still on the rolls.

Trish Regan admitted that “this is not the huge find people had hoped for,” and DOGE got out over its skis. Jill, if even MAGA journalists can’t swallow what DOGE is peddling, that’s pretty bad. What does that tell you?

Lawrence: Well, they’re sloppy, and they’re trying to do this move-fast-and-break-things model. It doesn’t even work all the time for the private sector; it certainly doesn’t work for a government with a lot of responsibilities. And the situation they were talking to had to do with a computer coding system that a lot of young people and people like me who don’t know computer coding don’t know anything about. My understanding is that the people in charge of these databases at Social Security Administration figured out that it was going to cost a huge amount to clean out the database and decided to ironically save money by leaving in all these names that everyone else who’s familiar with the system apparently knew were not getting checks.

Sargent: It’s unbelievable. I want to go to your piece for a second. You referred to this a little earlier that people and programs are actually being put at risk. That’s the real story here. You wrote in your piece that all of this is having extreme consequences: undermining aviation safety, nuclear weapons safety, putting classified data and Americans working abroad for USAID in danger. Is that not the real story here? I think we’re getting a crash course in why we want a federal government. We’re not getting a crash course in the “waste, fraud, and abuse” that’s corrupted the government to its core, are we?

Lawrence: No, we’re getting a crash course in the human cost, and what happens when business guys treat the government like just another capitalist enterprise. It is a story of human consequences and also of services that we might not notice we need until they’re gone. It’s also a corruption type of education because there’s been some great journalism about why Elon Musk has chosen the agencies he started with. They’re all investigating him, and his businesses, so you can see the motives right there. I don’t know whether we’re ever going to get a fix on how much, if any, money was ever saved. A couple of judges this week were having a hard time. Tanya Chutkan could not even get them to say how many people they’ve fired or laid off.

Sargent: And Tanya Chutkan is the judge who’s overseeing the case in which there’s a lawsuit alleging that Elon Musk is functioning in a fundamentally unconstitutional role. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Lawrence: That would be the argument, although their counterargument now is the equivalent of, No, he’s not.

Sargent: Right. It’s kind of funny. This is a bit of an aside for listeners here, but they’re now trying to argue that Musk doesn’t actually run DOGE because they understand that Musk is vulnerable on this point. He’s filling a role, according to this lawsuit, that’s fundamentally unconstitutional. He’s functioning like someone who should have been through a process of a confirmation, and he wasn’t.

Lawrence: That’s true. People who are confirmed and go through normal channels have a lot of requirements for transparency and disclosure, and there should be no question about what they are doing in the government.

Sargent: I think there’s a bigger problem here. It’s that MAGA mythology about the “deep state” is the thing that’s not sustainable. The deep state is not deeply corrupted and shot through with fraud. It’s not run by parasites. Its beneficiaries aren’t parasites, as Musk said the other day—it’s the American people. The government is run by professional civil servants and it’s the reason we have a highly functioning society. So the bigger mythology is the thing that they can’t sustain. What do you think of that?

Lawrence: I think that you’re right in that you could turn that argument on its head and say that Musk is the parasite. He’s the one with the government contract. He’s the one getting billions and billions. This may not be related, but it’s sort of related in Delaware now—he’s been trying to get tens of billions and billions of a payout from Tesla. And now it looks like, after a judge turned it down twice as not on the level, they may be changing the law to accommodate him. I’m going to have to look up into that some more because that just seems not the right thing to do, but he’s just going to soak everything for all it’s worth, including the government. In fact, his space company, SpaceX, which just had a crash that endangered aircraft in the air, is now supposedly going to be helping us make our aviation safer.

Sargent: It’s ludicrous. Musk is known to personally hate having SpaceX subjected to government regulation and oversight. And he’s the guy who’s going to fix the government from that perspective. The whole thing is just topsy turvy. It’s really the through the looking glass, MAGA-style.

Lawrence: Well, it really is. And you have to wonder where he gets the time considering he has a dozen children at this point.

Sargent: Good point. Well, there was another line from Miller’s meltdown I want to highlight. He said to Keilar, “I realize that even a brief interruption in federal employment is a great crisis for you and for CNN.” Now, this idea that there’s this monolithic enemy that Trump is taking on, one that is comprised of both the media and the deep state, is such a ridiculous and embarrassing fiction. It’s amazing that someone like Miller, who’s not dumb, would try to go on national TV and say it with a straight face. But Jill, is the game here that Miller knows MAGA believes this myth? Or that MAGA will get excited if Miller stages a showdown with a fake news anchor regardless of the details? What’s going on here?

Lawrence: I don’t think that there’s any surprise that he’s talking about the media having a great tragedy. The great tragedies in every family that’s been affected by this—people who had already lined up housing and daycare and all kinds of things in various places and now have no salary coming in. It’s the typical callousness of how they deal with things, and it does play to his audience because they hate the media. They’ve been primed to hate the media, and they do consider the media monolithic. So I don’t think he’s going to lose any points with Trump supporters over that. To me, to hear him talk about the hardship for the media is just crazy.

Sargent: I think we shouldn’t even pretend that any of what Musk and Trump and Miller are up to is about government reform at all. Let’s not even dignify the idea by playing along with it in any sense. It’s about destroying the state in its current form. What do you think they envision replacing it? What’s the long-term game plan here?

Lawrence: I just go back to Russ Vought, the head of the Office of Management and Budget and Project 2025. They want a nation of conformists who conform to their view of how they think things should be, with white men in charge and everybody else in subsidiary positions. I know it sounds like The Handmaid’s Tale or something insane—that with JD Vance, the vice president, talking about families with more children should get more votes. That was a while ago, but it seems to fit. It’s all aimed at conformity and repression. And these are people, of course, who talk about themselves as champions of free speech, which is a laughing.... It’s too sad to laugh at, actually. It’s too opposite.

And even with edicts like there are only two genders when any scientist and a lot of other people know that’s not the case, that there’s all kinds of ambiguity in biology—they’re just telling us black is white and white is black and we’re supposed to believe it and just conform. And you see this happening. You see, for instance, missing children centers getting rid of their LGBTQ references so they can keep their federal funding because that expression, that speech is frowned upon. Or West Point canceling affinity clubs like women engineers because they don’t want to lose federal funding or get on a blacklist because DEI. I think that’s what they’re aiming for, just repressive society where everyone has to obey them.

Sargent: And this is Musk’s vision of what’s necessary to save civilization, supposedly. We’re getting a crash course in this as well. They have seized control of the state and they’re putting it to use to incredibly radical ends in an incredibly radical and destructive way. And they don’t care about the collateral damage you’re describing here. They don’t care how many people it hurts. They have decided, in their messianic fantasies, that they’re saviors of some kind. So I watched Stephen Miller up there raging at a reporter for not bowing down to the glory that is Musk’s DOGE. And I’ve got say, it’s not a pretty picture. It looks like it’s headed to a very dark place.

Lawrence: That’s right in terms of the feds and the situation in Washington. More and more you’re hearing about economic consequences outside of the East or outside of Washington. You hear about park rangers and summer employees being cancelled or fired in places like Zion National Park in Utah—and this is a big deal. It’s very hard to understand how Republicans themselves are going to sustain this if they don’t serve their constituents instead of Donald Trump? It’s going to come down to that, don’t you think?

Sargent: I do think so. I think that it’s going to be much, much harder over time for Republicans to sustain the mythology that we’re talking about here. Jill Lawrence, thanks so much for coming on.

Lawrence: It’s always great to talk to you. Thanks, Greg. I enjoyed it.

Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.