On Monday morning, Logan woke up to an email.

I can probably pull it up, and tell you what it said . USAID headquarters building. Ronald Reagan building is closed at the direction of agency leadership...

'Now, Logan is not her real name, and we're discussing her voice due to fears of retaliation. That's because Logan is a federal employee, one of 10,000 civil servants at the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, since 1961. It's been the humanitarian arm of the U.S. as it works to alleviate poverty, treat diseases and respond to disasters all around the world. It had already been an eventful weekend for the agency, thanks to President Donald Trump and his pick to lead DOJ's the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Elon Musk.

The president moved to dismantle the US Agency for International Development, USAID, and two top officials there were suspended for refusing to give Musk deputies access to sensitive systems.

On Saturday, the agency's website had gone completely dark, typing usaid.gov. You get the message. This site can't be reached. But for Logan, the Monday morning message to stay home took things to the next level. And what goes through your mind when you read that?

Well, it seemed that our website was pulled down over the weekend and I set off across the building. And so I tried to log on because I was panicked and I thought, I need to download my personal orders. I need to make sure I have other critical documents. And I was not able to log on to my computer.

Logan was not able to do any work. He wasn't sure what would happen next if she would be put on leave. She was asking, Does she still have a job at all?

There's potential for a lot for me to worry. I'm the insurance provider. I have a real responsibility, so I'm definitely worried about that. I'm also worried about an entire sector of people being out of work looking all at the same time.

By the end of the day Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio had been appointed as the acting director of the agency, and for all intents and purposes, this independent agency had been subsumed by the State Department. The whole saga has left longtime civil servants like Logan wondering about the future of the foreign assistance work she's been doing for over 20 years and what that says about how our government operates.

Are we governed by people who elect senators and congressmen who determine how funds are allocated and expended? Or do we have a privileged few who have no accountability to anyone to say what they're doing and the changes that they're making? That's very dangerous. It's a slippery slope.

'There are a lot of people like Logan with a lot of questions. Among them, can Musk legally do what he's doing? And how will this effort to purge federal employees trickled down to the rest of America? My guest is Zack Wolf. He's a CNN politics senior writer and the author of The What Matters Newsletter. We're going to explain how Musk Silicon Valley approach of move fast and break stuff is arriving without apparent accountability from CNN. This is one thing. I'm David Rind. So we knew the Trump administration, along with Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, wanted to reshape how the government spends money and more generally, how it operates. But I don't think we quite expected what we've been seeing over the last couple of days and for the last two weeks, really, it's been head spinning, honestly. So where shall we start with all this?

I think the most interesting element of it and probably the most important is that, yes, we knew that they wanted to do some of these things, but we didn't. And we still don't know ultimately what their vision is. This is being done so quietly, but also expansively. So it's like this whole of government effort to cut people and spending that we as journalists and you as the public don't really have a full grasp of. And I think that's the most important thing here, is we don't actually know what they're doing because they haven't told us.

We do know about a couple of standoffs at specific agencies, I'm thinking specifically of the Treasury Department and USAID. So, like, what do we know about what has happened there?

We know that there was a standoff at the Treasury Department before Trump's treasury secretary was confirmed over access by Elon Musk allies to essentially the US government's bank accounts and how it spends money. And when we talk about the government's bank accounts. Think Social Security, Medicare, everything.

Mr. President, why is it important. For each one of us to have access to the payment systems at Treasury?

Well, he's got access only to letting people go that he thinks are no good. If we agree with him. And it's only if we agree with him. He's a very talented guy from the standpoint of management and costs.

And Donald Trump was asked about it, why Elon Musk needed access to this stuff. And he essentially said that it was to lay people off the numbers.

Some of the numbers are horrible what he's found.

Which is not something that I think we understand exactly what he's talking about, although he's kind of obliquely referred to firing a bunch of people after February 6th. You know, there's this real disconnect with all this stuff. What there is not is a lot of clarity. We do know that Musk has access or his allies have access to this payment system now. But why do they need access to this stuff?

Elon can't do and won't do anything without our approval. And we'll give him the approval where appropriate. Where? Not appropriate. We won't.

And if I could just add, we don't know what's the stop on him? Because Trump said he added that he will stop him before he does anything that we don't want him to do.

There's a conflict that we won't let him get near it, but he does have a good natural instinct. He's got a team of very talented people. We're trying to shrink government.

What's the mechanism for that? Is he going to trump or, you know, some official person before stopping some sort of payment or not? We just don't know.

Is shaping up to be a key theme of this conversation here.

Right. We all have more questions than answers right now. And I think that's what's kind of the most alarming. Again, we don't know.

Do we know anything about the folks that Elon Musk has brought along with him to kind of carry out some of this work at the agency to agency level?

Yeah, they're there. A lot of them work for his companies for the boring company's CEO is now apparently that's one of these long Musk companies this guy is now at OPM. According to a CNN report, there's a woman, Amanda scales, who is in charge of h.R. At his artificial intelligence company xxii. She's also at opm. There are they are kind of spread around and a lot of them come from his universe of companies. So he has instilled these people in key roles.

I think a lot of people have been wondering, like a pretty basic question here. Is Elon Musk a government employee?

Sort of. He is a special government employee. We didn't learn that until Tuesday. Even though Trump has been president for some time. Elon Musk has been going to, you know, the Office of Personnel Management. He's been going to the General Services Administration. He's been going to all these government agencies with his quote unquote, allies who are instilled in government positions. And Musk and some of them are special government employees they can serve. Now, this gets kind of technical, but it's important he can serve in this position for 130 days out of 365. We don't think he's taking a salary. We do think he has security clearance. We don't know how he got it. Did was that the subject of a background check? Like did they look at all of his ties to China and Russia, or was it just that President Trump said, I'd like this guy to have security clearance and now he has it? We don't think he's going to have to file conflict of interest documents. Like most, you know, the vast majority of government employees will. We do know that he personally, the companies that he controls, get a lot of government contracts.

So he's going to say space sex has billions of dollars in government contracts.

Right. The conflict of interest is quite obvious. We don't really need him to file paperwork to tell us that he has an interest in who's getting government money because it's him.

Yeah, I think it's kind of in the fine print of the special government employees is covered by a federal conflicts of interest statute that would prohibit employees from participating in matters that would affect their financial interests. But the key is that law can be enforced criminally by the Justice Department. But in this case, it would be Trump's Justice Department and not sure if they would be of any appetite to prosecute a big Trump ally like Elon Musk.

No, certainly not. And I you know, I do think that the smell test is is is one way to guide yourself. And should this world's richest man have unfettered access to the world's wealthiest countries bank accounts? I mean, ask yourself that question.

You know, with regard to the USAID stuff, I went went over it with him in detail and he agreed with that. We should we should shut it down...

That's Musk has been very clear. He wants USAID to just go away.

'It's also incredibly politically partizan and has been supporting radical left causes throughout the world, including things that are anti-American, which is insane.

Can he do that legally?

I don't know. USAID was created in 1961 by John F Kennedy as a way to help the developing world and create friends for the United States and, you know, essentially stop the spread of communism. So there is a long history of the U.S. doing this stuff. Congress told the government to do it. If you've read the Constitution, the president is supposed to enact the laws. So there's a law for this. So what if Donald Trump just makes it cease to exist? Who stops him from doing that? There will be lawsuits. Who brings those lawsuits? Does the current conservative Supreme Court entertain them? It seems like the textualist, the people, the originalist, they like to call themselves on the Supreme Court, wouldn't like a president just essentially seizing all this power. But the end game of how you challenge trying to end an agency is not yet clear to me. I mean, should be Congress's job to pass laws to tell him to stop.

Can we tell how much of these efforts are truly about cost cutting and government efficiency or about just eliminating any resistance to Donald Trump's agenda?

I would love to see the spreadsheet that Elon Musk has that shows him how much money he thinks he's going to save doing this. I don't have it. They haven't shared it. All federal salaries combined are something like $200 billion a year, which sounds like a lot of money. Yeah, as we're talking, but it's very little. In a country that spends trillions of dollars every year. They are a fraction of government spending, most of which goes to things like Medicare, Social Security. Those are the big kind of sacred cows that Trump has said they won't touch. Elon Musk, however, has talked about the need to, you know, make Medicare and Medicaid in particular more efficient. He hasn't gotten in that part of his plan yet, but we don't know the numbers that they're working off. It feels right now like they're just trying to get a clean slate, see what they can cut in these first couple of weeks before the Congress. The public turns on them and then go from there. That's what it feels like to me. There could be some master plan that they haven't shared with us, but I don't know what it is.

This all kind of strikes me as very similar to how Musk handled his acquisition of Twitter as he was transforming it into X. And there's even been reports that he's been sleeping at DOJ's offices in D.C. kind of like how he camped out at Twitter HQ in the early days, and we kind of saw that played out, right. Lots of people lost their jobs. The service itself kind of ground to a halt for a while, became much less usable to users. Is that kind of where we're headed at this point? Well.

I don't know where we're headed because there are so many questions about whether any of this is legal. How who will pay for it? I think the best example of what you're talking about is the fork in the road email that the government workers, millions of them apparently have gotten these emails offering them to, you know, the ability to resign. It's essentially a buyout, but they're calling it a deferred resignation where you resign, the government pays you until September and then you're done. You're basically giving up your government job in or in exchange for 8 to 9 months of severance. It was done with this outside of government email address. It took all these government workers by surprise. Nobody else within the government knew it was coming. It's not funded. They've made this promise to federal workers and Congress has not given them money to do it. So they are essentially all they have given people until February 6th. That's Thursday to take this deal. And people are essentially taking a leap of faith. So it's seems like it could of these people will ultimately get paid. It's not guaranteed. And that's why government unions, Democratic lawmakers are all counseling federal employees not to take the deal. But you're absolutely right. He's using this Twitter style playbook, but he's doing it on the largest employer in the country, which is the federal government.

Yeah. So obviously, implications for the federal workers themselves. But beyond D.C. and just the average person out there, why should. They'd be paying attention at this kind of level to what is going on with Musk and Trump and how this is all playing out.

There's a couple of reasons. And let me let me take through, number one. Structurally, this is just not the way it's supposed to work. Congress is supposed to say what's supposed to happen. The president's supposed to carry it through. The federal bureaucracy is something that grew up over the course of 100 years after a really bad spoils system was horrible. Civil service reform was the most important issue in a number of presidential elections in the 1880s. So this is something it's not something we thought up overnight. It built up over the course of the past couple hundred years, and now they're trying to change it without really any input over the course of a couple of weeks. Number two, I think that people have lost appreciation for things that the government does. And let's just look at the plane crash that happened not too long ago. Immediately after that, they rescinded the resignation offer for NTSB investigators because it turns out those people do a very difficult job. It takes a lot of specialty. And suddenly we realize that we need them. We need those people.

Maybe we shouldn't just let them walk out the door.

Right. And in fact, they say told them they can't take the buyout deal. Should government be made more efficient? I think probably, yeah. I don't think there's anybody who argues that it shouldn't. Should it be made more efficient with a sledgehammer? These are things that are going to have repercussions for years to come. So we're going to be talking about these moments right now are like an inflection point for the Trump administration, but also for the coming years of of American governance. There's nothing that we can chart to see if they're doing what they're setting out to do. And frankly, we don't really know exactly what their endgame is. So that's not the way things work in an open democracy or.

Yeah, a lot unknown, But I appreciate you trying to make sense of what we do and where we go from here. Thanks. I appreciate it.

Thanks for having me.

One thing is a production of CNN Audio. This episode was produced by Paola Ortiz and me, David Rind. Our senior producers are Felicia Patinkin and Faiz Jamil. Matt Dempsey is our production manager. Dan Dzula as our technical director. And Steve Lickteig is the executive producer of CNN Audio. We get support from Haley Thomas, Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, John Dianora, Leni Steinhart, Jamus Andrest, Nichole Pesaru and Lisa Namerow. Special thanks to Wendy Brundage. We got another episode on Sunday. Make sure you follow the show so you don't miss it. It'll pop right up for you. Talk to you then.