From the New York Times, this is the Daily. I'm Rachel Abrams.

Today, Elon Musk and his team have taken a hacksaw to the federal bureaucracy, one agency at a time.

And the question has become whether he's on a crusade

that will leave the government paralyzed

or deliver exactly the kind of shake-up

it's needed for years.

My colleague, Jonathan Swan,

takes us inside this hostile takeover of Washington.

Thank you. It's Wednesday, February 5th.

So, Jonathan, we always understood that Elon Musk was going to be important in this administration, in the second Trump presidency.

Trump had given the group that Musk was put in charge of, the Department of Government Efficiency, or Doge, as is commonly known, the job of shrinking the entire federal government.

But the question was always just how much power Musk would

actually have as a private citizen operating outside the president's cabinet. And over the past

few days, we've actually started to get an answer, which is a whole lot of power.

Yes, his power is extraordinary. He effectively is unaccountable. Donald Trump has fully empowered him to

roam across the federal government, get inside the pipes of the federal government,

look at the payment systems and the databases to embed inside these agencies.

Right. So this is not some chin stroking professor doing an analysis of government from the outside and, you know, let me sit down at my table

and write you some recommendations. You know, Walter Isaacson wrote a biography about Elon Musk where people

who know him talk about, quote unquote, demon mode, which he goes into, which is this sort of

manic energy, staying up all night, sleeping on the floor of the factory. He's done this at Tesla,

SpaceX, Twitter, setting unrealistic deadlines, doing mass layoffs because he thinks stuff

...