WASHINGTON — Vice President JD Vance acknowledged Friday that Elon Musk has made “mistakes” while executing mass firings of federal employees and emphasized that he believes there are “a lot of good people who work in the government.”
“Elon himself has said that sometimes you do something, you make a mistake, and then you undo the mistake. I’m accepting of mistakes,” Vance said in an interview with NBC News.
“I also think you have to quickly correct those mistakes. But I’m also very aware of the fact that there are a lot of good people who work in the government — a lot of people who are doing a very good job. And we want to try to preserve as much of what works in government as possible, while eliminating what doesn’t work.”
Vance’s gentler tone represented a contrast from the chainsaw approach that Musk, the world’s wealthiest man, has taken as he leads President Donald Trump’s initiative to slash federal spending and reorient the federal bureaucracy. The firings of thousands of government employees has been the centerpiece of Musk’s work over the first seven weeks of Trump’s second White House administration, with the cuts yielding lawsuits and pushback from judges. Musk has broadly characterized federal workers as “fraudsters” who can’t be trusted to do their jobs.
“I think some people clearly are collecting a check and not doing a job,” Vance said when asked about such comments from Musk. “Now, how many people is that? I don’t know, in a 3 million-strong federal workforce, whether it’s a few thousand or much larger than that.”
“However big the problem is, it is a problem when people are living off the generosity of the American taxpayer in a civil service job and not doing the people’s business,” he added. “That doesn’t distract or detract from the fact that you do have a lot of great civil servants who are doing important work. But I think most of those great civil servants would say we want to be empowered to do our job. We don’t want the person who doesn’t show up five days a week to make it harder for us to do what we need to do.”
Vance’s comments came during an exclusive and wide-ranging interview aboard Air Force Two, as the vice president and second lady Usha Vance returned from a visit to a plastics factory in Bay City, Michigan. His motorcade’s ride into town illustrated how different life is now for him and his young family.
Dozens of protesters had lined the street leading to the factory, greeting Vance and his traveling party with middle fingers and vulgar signs, one of which featured a crossed-out swastika and read “Go home, scumbag.” The previous night, Vance was booed while arriving for a performance at the Kennedy Center in Washington. And while walking with his 3-year-old daughter near their home in Ohio last weekend, Vance found himself in a civil but, in his description, upsetting conversation with pro-Ukraine demonstrators.
“The thing at the Kennedy Center I thought was funny,” Vance said aboard his plane Friday afternoon. “The thing by my house I thought was kind of annoying. I think you just kind of take the good with the bad. … I kind of just see it as, depending on your perspective, a feature or a bug of this new life.”
In his remarks at the factory, where he was welcomed by a friendlier, pro-Trump audience filled with local Republicans, Vance touted the administration’s commitment to manufacturing and economic recovery while tempering expectations for the rapid turnaround that Trump promised on the campaign trail.
A majority of respondents in two polls released this week — 56% of adults surveyed by CNN, 54% of registered voters surveyed by Quinnipiac University — said they disapproved of how Trump is handling the economy. Meanwhile, Trump’s push for tariffs on foreign products has ignited fears of a trade war that could raise consumer prices.
“Now I have to be honest with you,” Vance said in Bay City. “The road ahead of us is long, but we are already, in just seven short weeks, starting to see early indications of the president’s vision becoming our shared American reality.”
During the campaign, Vance frequently spoke of a woman he had met who said that she and her husband could no longer afford their weekly tradition of grilling steaks on Friday nights. Reminded of that story aboard his plane Friday, Vance described recent lower gas prices as a positive sign.
Vance also acknowledged that “you already see things leveling off to, not an ideal situation, but a much better and more significant improvement” while casting blame on former President Joe Biden, whose policies he said had left Trump in a hole.
“My ambition is that we see some pretty quick results, that you start to see at least a pathway towards financial stability,” said Vance, specifically noting 10,000 manufacturing jobs added last month. “You’re going to see progress. I think it’s going to be incremental progress. But I also think it’s important to be honest with people that you don’t get to $2 trillion deficits overnight. You’re not going to get out of $2 trillion deficits overnight.”
Vance also discussed his early role in shaping and articulating Trump’s foreign policy agenda, from a provocative speech at last month’s Munich Security Conference to an extraordinary Oval Office clash two weeks ago with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whom Vance had accused of being insufficiently thankful for U.S. aid.
“I just try not to be overly scripted,” Vance said before recalling his speech in Munich, which upbraided European leaders over issues such as free speech and mass migration. “The classic thing to do in Munich would have been to show up and give a speech about NATO or give a speech about where the Ukraine-Russia thing was at that moment in time, and just sort of thought to myself, like, ‘What is it that I think is really important to say?’ And the president was OK with me saying it, so I said it.”
Vance added that he doesn’t “go into these things trying to be like a spokesman for the administration. Some of that happens naturally, but fundamentally, the president is the spokesman for the administration, and everything flows from there. I try to do a good job. I try to say things both that I think are true but also are in accordance with the president’s preferences. And let the chips fall where they may.”
Trump, who is constitutionally barred from serving another term, raised eyebrows in a Fox News interview last month by saying it was “too early” to anoint Vance as his successor in 2028. Vance and others close to Trump have since brushed off the question and Trump’s answer to it, agreeing that such talk was premature.
Asked a variation of the question Friday — does he view himself as Trump’s successor? — Vance replied that he’s not thinking about a presidential campaign at the moment. He related the story of how he felt on Election Night, when, surrounded by his closest friends and family, it became clear he had won the vice presidency.
“Wow, I’m the vice president-elect of the United States,” Vance recalled thinking. “And, you know, if I never go further in politics, I’m totally fine with that, but we get a really good opportunity to do a lot of really good s— the next four years.”
“If I do really well for the next four years, everything else will take care of itself. … Now, like, yeah, in two and a half years, will that become harder? Will people be more focused on politics than on what the White House is maybe doing that particular day? Maybe,” he added.
“I mean, man, if I was like a central figure to getting the Russia-Ukraine crisis solved, who gives a s— what I do after this?” Vance said. “That’s kind of the attitude I take. So I’m very focused on doing a good job.”
