Eric Lipton
speaker
759 appearances
6 recordings
4 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 5 Aug
Eric Lipton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
the Federal Aviation Administration, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, the Employment, you know, EEOC, NLRB, the FEC, the SEC. I mean, there are so many acronyms, so many places that either regulating him or paying him at the same time as he has this immense power to help decide what their regulatory powers and budgets are.
It's just how does one single person do all those things without having a massive conflict of interest?
If you look at the first Trump administration and then went into Biden, it's really striking the extent of the pendulum swing. I mean, so many of the regulatory rollbacks that Trump implemented were then rolled back by Biden. The thing that really is going to make determine the course of history is what the courts decide now.
Because if the courts side with Trump and realign the constitutional powers in a way that Russell Vaught and others in the Trump administration believe, then that really is going to create, it's not going to be a pendulum swing anymore. It's going to be a fundamental change in the distribution of power in the United States.
And all of these lawsuits, while they're annoying to the Trump administration and to Elon Musk, that's where the test is really going to come. And who knows how the court is going to decide. You know, it's really sort of hard to predict. But what I can say is that that's the thing that really is going to determine how consequential all of this is.
Because many of these things can be rolled back in whatever the next Democratic administration is. But if the courts decide that the executive branch really has these broad powers to decide the finances and the operations of federal agencies are, that's huge. And it will be tested at some point in the next four years.
Thank you.
Thanks for having me.
What we did was we sort of examined the breadth of Elon Musk operations across the federal government. And there are, you know, there are so many pending investigations, lawsuits, inquiries. And we looked at how many of them had been disrupted. And we were quite surprised at how many cases we saw where You know, we don't know.
We never saw any evidence of Musk explicitly reaching in and, you know, using his cloud or powers to stop any particular investigation. But what we saw was that it again and again. Agencies that are targeting his companies have now had significant disruptions. The inspector generals, the quorums are gone. They can't, therefore, process any potential new lawsuits or settlements.
And, you know, it just shows you how never before have we had a situation where someone has basically $13 billion worth of federal contracts over the last five years, $3.8 billion just in 2024, and at the same time has dozens of ongoing investigations, that that same person would be given such incredible clout over the federal government. And that is a conflict of interest.
And now we're seeing the implications of that, where there are more than dozens of investigations that have been potentially disrupted because of the broad disruption that's happening in the federal government. And that's something that we really felt we needed to drill down on and understand and identify as many cases as possible where these disruptions have occurred.
And that's what we published in today's paper.
I've been a reporter for three decades, more than three decades. I've never seen anything like this. I've never seen such a blatant conflict of interest. He is one of the largest contractors for the federal government. Again, $15 billion in contracts just in the last decade.
And the notion that an individual who could be running or founding or operating so many companies that have so many contracts with the federal government, and at the same time, deciding what the budgets of the federal agency should be or what regulatory powers they should have, and even what investigative and enforcement powers they should have,
And I mean, the thing is that even before the election, Musk was very clear that he had intense frustration with the Federal Aviation Administration, with the Securities and Exchange Commission. He wanted the FAA administrator fired. He called the SEC political. And, you know, he was very pointed in the Department of Interior.
He was very frustrated with he blamed all of these agencies for, you know, we're never going to get humans to Mars at this pace. And it was very clear that he wanted to have the ability to to to, you know, to clash with these regulators and to rein them in. And now he has that power. And now these same agencies are having their powers curtail.
Now, again, we don't have evidence that he has directly reached in, but there is a correlation that that needed to be called out. And we've now called it out.
Thank you.
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