How the richest person in the world is reshaping Washington
On Point with Meghna Chakrabarti
WBUR
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 11 February 2025
⏱️ 49 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Elon Musk is rapidly dismantling or taking control of government agencies during President Trump’s first weeks in power. But is he or Trump in control?
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Transcript
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| 0:51.1 | This is on point. |
| 0:52.6 | I'm Megna Chakrabardi. |
| 0:59.6 | Robert Rubin served as the United States Treasury Secretary from 1995 to 1999. |
| 1:04.5 | Lawrence Summers followed him as secretary from 1999 to 2001. |
| 1:09.3 | Timothy Geithner led the Treasury from 2009 to 2013. |
| 1:15.6 | Then Jacob Liu from 2013 to 2017, followed by Janet Yellen, |
| 1:24.0 | who held the post from 2021 until January 2025. Together, they comprise multiple decades leading the largest, most important Treasury Department in the world. |
| 1:28.4 | And yesterday, in the New York Times, these former Treasury secretaries of the United States |
| 1:34.3 | issued a warning to all Americans that the nation's democracy is at risk. |
| 1:41.1 | Quote, we take the extraordinary step of writing this piece because we are alarmed about the arbitrary and capricious political control of federal payments which would be unlawful and corrosive to our democracy. |
| 1:56.1 | End quote. They are trying to warn the American people about the ransacking of the nation's payment system by Elon Musk. |
| 2:07.8 | In the last week of January, a group of young men, aged 19 to their mid-20s, entered the Treasury Department. |
| 2:14.3 | They worked for Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency. |
| 2:18.5 | They demanded access to the federal government's extensive and complex payment system that |
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