Senator Mark Kelly knows Elon Musk better than most Americans do.
Kelly, an Arizona Democrat, is a former NASA astronaut and Navy combat pilot. He used to consult for SpaceX about crew safety, he told me, and sat in on meetings there with Musk. He drove a Tesla for a while, before very publicly returning it this year.
In a way, Kelly embodies the whiplash many Democrats feel when it comes to Musk, and he has emerged as one of the billionaire’s most vocal critics in Washington. With the Trump administration approaching its 100th day tomorrow, I called Kelly to ask him what it’s like to tangle with Musk on X — and what power Democrats really have to unwind the changes Musk has already set into motion.
JB: You are one of many Democrats who have decided to return their Teslas. Do you miss it?
MK: No, no. There’s things I liked about it, which was the performance. The thing is pretty incredible from an acceleration standpoint. It’s the closest thing I can think of to a catapult-shot off the front of the aircraft carrier. Though I was back on the U.S.S. Lincoln about a year ago, in the back of an F-18, and I realized it still is not that close.
It’s fun to drive. What I didn’t like about it is, I was driving less than 200 miles a month, but I was having to charge it every week, constantly thinking, OK, when am I going to plug this car in next time?
Did you replace it with something?
Yeah, I got a Tahoe.
Elon Musk became central to certain aspects of Democrats’ messaging over the past several months. But for you, it’s been a little more personal, because Musk insulted you during an X dispute involving your brother, the astronaut Scott Kelly, about the astronauts at the Space Station — and then he called you a “traitor” after you visited Ukraine.
He called me a traitor for doing my job, essentially, and supporting our ally. It’s almost comical, because if I’m the traitor, well, that means you must be on the side of Russia.
He’s the one who made this personal. I don’t really care what he says about me.
What happens when the richest man in the world calls you a traitor? Do you get more threats?
I do feel like it kind of ticked up a little bit. And it’s not only me, it’s Gabby [Giffords, his wife and a former congresswoman] too. Even though she’s been shot, nearly assassinated, people threaten to kill her as well.
My family especially knows that this is a full-contact sport. If you’re going to decide to serve the country in this way, you subject yourself to a bit of risk.
This juvenile stuff Elon does, that stuff doesn’t really matter. What matters is the damage he’s doing to our country, to the federal government, to these agencies that help people, not only within our borders but around the world, and the help we provide to other nations through things like USAID.
I’m not against the whole idea that we’ve got to figure out a way to reduce the size of the federal budget. But this ain’t it. Sending one dude and a bunch of his minions in here to just slash and burn without any analysis or a plan, and then giving them access to the personal information of 350 million citizens of our country, is not what anybody signed up for when they went to vote for Donald Trump.
You hit on something that I think is important, which is that cutting government spending is pretty popular.
And it should be.
Spending on foreign aid is not terribly popular. Does opposing DOGE’s cuts pose any political risk to Democrats?
Sometimes you’ve got to take risks to do the right thing, and try to nudge us back in the right direction. I am not going to get behind Elon or anybody else’s cuts to food assistance. I was talking to Cindy McCain [the executive director of the World Food Program] about this the other day. Her budget’s been just axed, and now she’s got to decide who starves to death and who doesn’t because of Elon Musk and Donald Trump. These decisions have consequences.
I get it that when you’re going about your life here, it might seem like a hard pill to swallow, to be spending any money overseas trying to help somebody else. But hey, we are the leaders of the free world, and the world is a much more dangerous place without the United States of America leading our allies.
You can spend a little bit of money on trying to solve these problems, like famine in places like Sudan or Afghanistan or other countries, or you can buy more bullets.
There’s somebody that might be complaining about foreign aid today, and tomorrow, or five years from now, they’re sending their kid overseas to fight in a war that wouldn’t have otherwise happened if people like Elon Musk didn’t go through and jam through these changes.
What can Democrats actually do to curtail DOGE or stop what Musk is doing?
I’m on the phone with my Arizona attorney general regularly about this and talking about the lawsuits that they can file.
We try to encourage our Republican colleagues to have hearings, or try to persuade them that these cuts that they’re making are not a good idea and get them to get off the sidelines.
Is that working?
It’s a slow process. But I think it does work. You say, ‘Hey, how do you feel about the cuts to your university’s funding for all this research?’ They start thinking about it. It’s a slow, slow process, like turning around the aircraft carrier.
Is there any lesson that you think Democrats have learned over the past 100 days — any way that you want to kind of calibrate or adjust the approach to Musk and DOGE going forward?
According to the White House, he’s not going to be there much longer. Now, we’ve also heard Donald Trump change his mind on things almost daily. But he may be gone soon. Then, the question is, who replaces him in that role? Maybe he elevates one of his 20-something-year-old DOGE bros.
Just because somebody’s good at one thing, like, really good at one thing — and I’ll give Elon credit, he’s good at building a rocket — he is not good at this.
I think Donald Trump thinks he’s the smartest guy in the world because he’s the richest guy in the world. It does not work like that.
This conversation was condensed and edited for clarity.
MEANWHILE on X
Dentist interruptus? I’ve got products for that
Musk is using his X account as a megaphone. My colleague Steven Lee Myers, who covers misinformation and disinformation, checked in on where Musk seems to be focusing.
Elon Musk’s retreat from his cost-cutting role in the federal government has become increasingly evident as his attention turns more and more to his businesses. He seized on the widespread power outages in Spain, Portugal and France on Monday to promote two of his companies, Tesla and Starlink.
The impetus was a post on X by a Spanish-American supporter of President Trump and the MAGA movement. Ada Lluch, who describes herself on X as “just a girl with common sense” and has more than 300,000 followers, complained that the blackout had disrupted her grandfather’s dental surgery in Spain.
“My grandpa was in the middle of a surgery and I can’t contact them,” she said, in one of a series of posts that attacked Spain’s government.
“Tesla Powerwall plus Starlink should still work,” Musk replied, referring to the car company’s rechargeable home battery and to his satellite communications link.
— Steven Lee Myers
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‘It’s like being on “Chopped” every week’
The Trump administration has cut $1 billion in federal aid to anti-hunger groups, according to the advocacy group Feeding America. This month, my colleague David Fahrenthold went to a charity in Charleston, W.Va., to see how those cuts were playing out in the kitchen.
He met Sara Busse, who was feeding 40 needy seniors vegetable soup, dried cranberries and crackers. Food pantries across the state are trying to do more with much less since the Agriculture Department sharply curtailed its deliveries of free food. And that has left Busse feeling like she’s on a grim reality show about turning a dwindling food supply into 600 meals a week.
She used $35 of the church’s money to buy ground beef and chicken stock, fortifying the government’s wan soup. She found someone to donate three spinach salads, to which she added the cranberries. The crackers were her starch.
