- Trump's first Cabinet meeting of his second term focused on fiscal matters including government spending, debt reduction and revenue generation.
- Trump announced a new 'gold card' immigration program offering citizenship for $5 million per card to help pay off the national deficit.
- Trump plans to return education control to states after citing poor U.S. international education rankings, while also pursuing a rare earth deal with Ukraine to recover U.S. investments.
Sitting between Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, President Donald Trump on Wednesday led the first Cabinet meeting of his second term.
After the meeting, Trump invited members of the White House press corps to ask questions and he responded on issues like DOGE, Ukraine, education and the EU.
Trump began the meeting by discussing the state of affairs since he took office, saying illegal border crossings are down by over 100%, the lowest in 50 years. He added that his team is “fighting every day” to get prices down and cut inflation. A key part of this, he said, is the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
So far, Trump said the new department has cut billions of dollars, adding, “Maybe we can get it to a trillion dollars. If we can do that, maybe we can start talking about balancing budgets.”
Trump then asked Elon Musk to speak about DOGE.
‘The U.S. will go bankrupt,’ without DOGE, Musk says
Musk opened up his jacket to reveal a black shirt, matching his black MAGA hat, that said, “Tech Support,” and explained how a good portion of what he and his team have been doing is upgrading the federal government’s computer systems.
“Many of the systems are extremely old. They don’t communicate, there are a lot of mistakes in the systems, and the software doesn’t work,” Musk said.
Musk said the federal government needs to cut spending, as the U.S. currently pays $1 trillion annually on interest on the debt.
“If this continues, the country will go bankrupt. It’s not an optional thing, it’s an essential thing,” Musk said. He added, “I’m taking a lot of flack and getting a lot of death threats. I could like stack them up, you know? But if we don’t do this, America will go bankrupt.”
A reporter asked if anyone in the cabinet was unhappy with DOGE efforts, and Trump interrupted, looked around and asked, “Are any of you unhappy with DOGE? If you are, we’ll throw you out of here,” which was met by laughter and applause among the Cabinet members.
Musk explains what lead up to controversial X post
On Feb. 22, Musk posted to X, “Consistent with President @realDonaldTrump’s instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week. Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”
The post has nearly 100 million views, and it caused outrage on the internet and among some federal employees.
“We think a number of these people on the payroll are dead,” Musk explained.
Musk added that Trump asked him to be aggressive, and Musk asked if he could send the email.
“We wish to keep everyone who is doing a job that is essential and everyone who is doing their job well,” Musk said. Trump added that his administration is trying to find out who the people who didn’t respond to the email are.
Trump to return education to the states
“We want to move education back to the states where it belongs,” Trump said.
He cited an international ranking where the U.S. ranked poorly among peer states. He said the U.S. ranked 40 out of 40 in education quality. “A year ago, we were 38, 39, but a year ago we ranked 40,” he said.
In international rankings, the U.S. actually ranks 34th in math out of 81 countries and 16th in science, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
Trump believes moving education back to the states will increase its quality for all Americans.
Trump elaborates on the ‘gold card’
“We want people in our country, but we want them coming in legally,” Trump said.
He then explained the ‘gold card,” which would provide a new path to citizenship — and each one costs $5 million. As Trump explained in the Cabinet meeting, gold card visas would allow companies to hire recent top university grads, and the money would go toward the national deficit.
In the Oval Office, Tuesday, Trump told reporters that gold cards would allow wealthy people a route to citizenship. “They’ll be wealthy, and they’ll be successful, and they’ll be spending a lot of money and paying a lot of taxes,” he said.
“I happen to think it’s going to sell like crazy,” Trump said in the Cabinet meeting.
Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said he and the secretary of the Treasury would start selling gold cards “in about two weeks.” Each card would cost $5 million.
The rare earth deal progresses with Ukraine
Trump has been pressuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to make a deal that would give the U.S. access to rare minerals in the country.
Trump said his main motivation for the deal is to see the fighting between Ukraine and Russia stop.
However, Trump’s second reason for the deal is that “we need resources.”
“The deal we’re making brings us great wealth, it gets us back the money that we spent, and we hope that we’re going to settle this up,” Trump said.
He continued to compare European countries’ contributions to Ukraine with the U.S.‘s, saying Ukraine has promised to pay their neighbors back, while no promise has been made to the U.S.
European leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron, have said that is not true.