Pod Insights Search Engine DOGE and the Mystery of the State Department Teslas About this episode There’s a new president of America, and he’s doing a lot of things. How do you decide what to pay attention to? A story about reporters focusing on one mysterious line item during the DOGE headline storm, and where that led.
Bobby Allyn https://x.com/BobbyAllyn?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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2:30 PJ Vogt? So here's one of those questions that might actually be too big, or at least unanswerable by another person. I am really struggling, in the early days of the second Trump administration, to figure out how much attention to pay to what the new federal government is doing. I keep asking myself what, if anything, I learned the first time around. Back then, many of the stories I focused on ended up not mattering much. There were things that seemed maximally outrageous, but which later were supplanted by much more outrageous things. The first Trump presidency made everyone in American life more deranged, more crazy, including me. And the second time around, I personally have just felt like a person who maybe once got too drunk and now has a chance, on their second night out, to try to adjust.
3:17 PJ Vogt? Maybe. But it's difficult. One of the main facts of life in a Trump presidency is that the president is very talented at making your phone buzz. If you own a smartphone, you have this feeling that even if you don't understand what's going on in his office or his mind, that you are umbilically attached to his nervous system. Actually, that's what things were like in Trump I. In Trump II, we've now been plugged into a second nervous system, Elon Musk's. Because Elon Musk is making a lot of decisions, and Elon Musk tweets something like 25 hours a day. So now you have two of the most online people American society has ever produced. People who post more than anyone I know in my extremely too-online social circles, who are just constantly doing stuff.
4:03 PJ Vogt? And the stuff feels consequential. And if you're me and you move in my social circle, the stuff may not feel very thought-through, but it's also unclear which of these things to try to actually lock in on and understand.
4:17 PJ Vogt? The past couple of weeks, I was watching a reporter I follow try to get to the bottom of just one minor mystery that had surfaced around Elon Musk and the Trump administration, and watching him try to get to the truth. I felt like I was getting a very vivid postcard of our moment. There's a little microcosm of how hard it is to know what is going on and which questions to stick with. So I wanted to get him to come to Search Engine and tell me the story. Can you start by just saying your name and what you do?
4:43 Speaker 01 Yeah, sure. I'm Bobby Allen. I am a tech correspondent at NPR.
4:47 PJ Vogt? How long have you been covering tech?
4:49 Speaker 01 Something like five years or so. Kind of fell into it sideways. I was in DC covering politics and breaking news, and somebody tapped me on the shoulder one day and was like, hey, you want to go to San Francisco and cover tech? And I was like, honestly, when I pick up newspapers, I don't even read the tech section, so I think you're asking the wrong guy. But then they were like, yeah, but this is where all the power is. There's these people need more accountability. You think politics are important. Really, the decision makers and the gatekeepers are in Silicon Valley. And I said, OK, fine, I'll do it. So I've been doing it ever since.
5:24 PJ Vogt? And do you feel like that promise has turned out to be true, that you have turned from one power center in American life into another?
5:31 Speaker 01 Yeah, and I think the way that Silicon Valley operates has taken a lot of clues from Washington, right? Having this army of communications people who, you know, send you responses and answers to your questions by like committees of 10, operating with complete opacity, trying to front run stories before you get your own stories out, just the kind of constantly at war with reporter kind of vibe. It's just like brass knuckles. It's fighting these comms people. It's fighting the lieutenants around, you know, really powerful billionaires that are running these companies. It's very hostile. It's very confrontational.
6:11 Speaker 01 And I kind of like that in this sick, kind of weird way. Anyone who knows me will tell you that I invite drama and like fueling drama, and I'm like the biggest gossip anyone knows. So maybe I'm perfect for the job, but it's not for everyone, that's for sure.
6:30 PJ Vogt? And so tell me about this question you were trying to answer, this story about Elon Musk and an unusual line item in the State Department budget. Like, where does that story start for you?
6:43 Speaker 01 Yeah, so there's this reporter, Ryan Grim, and he did a story pointing out, I think, is it Dropsite is a website he writes for?
6:53 PJ Vogt? I think it's Dropsite News.
6:54 Speaker 01 Dropsite News, exactly. He did a story that just put a spotlight on this one item in a super boring, otherwise like ho-hum-whatever State Department spreadsheet of what the State Department thinks it's going to spend money on in 2025.
7:14 PJ Vogt? Okay, so this was a public document that the State Department had put on its website called a procurement forecast, an enormous, dense document that lists places where the State Department expects to spend taxpayer money. This document is not user-friendly, it's quite obscure. But Ryan Grim, this sharp dogged reporter, sat down and pored through the document just to check, was this new, unusual presidential administration doing anything new and unusual that might be revealed here in the spreadsheet's many lines? And Ryan Grim found something that seemed to him very strange. The US State Department, the part of the government that deals with diplomacy and foreign
7:54 PJ Vogt? policy, was revealing that they were going to spend $400 million on a fleet of new armored cars. Well, not just any armored cars, armored Teslas. Almost half a billion dollars in taxpayer money to be spent on electric vehicles made specifically by Elon Musk's company. Elon Musk, the man who these days is Donald Trump's right-hand man. So Ryan Grim publishes his story. Some outlets, like Rachel Maddow, start to zero in on what they perceive as the fishiness of all this.
8:24 Speaker 02 And isn't it great what they're doing? Isn't it great and definitely not at all illegal or profoundly corrupt for the president to put someone with billions of dollars in government contracts personally in charge of deciding what happens to government contracts?
8:39 Speaker 01 Rachel Maddow did a segment, The New York Times did a story. So this is swirling around the internet. Lots of people have takes, lots of people are weighing in. And then Elon Musk goes on X and basically calls Rachel Maddow a liar. Quote, "Hey Maddow, why the lie?" And of course, he doesn't back that up with any documentation.
9:00 PJ Vogt? So you're seeing all this back and forth. Like, you're seeing Elon's reaction. You're getting ready to do your story for NPR the next morning. When do you notice that the original State Department spreadsheet has been altered?
9:13 Speaker 01 So I'm watching all of this unfold and I go to the State Department's website and find this spreadsheet myself. I download it and I take a look and it has been edited. And it's not like, didn't take investigative journalism to figure this out. It's just on the State Department's website. I refreshed it and I saw, oh, the word Tesla has been removed and now it just says electric vehicle company. And they even wrote the time they edited it. And it was like two minutes before I had refreshed the page.
9:48 PJ Vogt? That's crazy.
9:50 Speaker 01 Yeah. So some people like to say it's not the crime, it's the cover up. This sure does look like some kind of cover up, right? Somebody after this got tons of attention and was something of a hubbub, took the word Tesla out of this document. And the reporter in me is just like, what is going on? At first, I thought this was really weird. Now I think it's even weirder and I'm just dying to know what is the real story here? Who did this? Why are they doing this? Who's behind it? My spidey sense as a reporter is just off the wall. The Trump administration is expected to purchase $400 million worth of Tesla vehicles. NPR'S Bobby Allen reports this comes as Tesla's CEO--
10:30 PJ Vogt? Bobby publishes his story the morning of February 13th. Things are moving.
10:35 Speaker 01 After reports circulated of the lucrative federal contract, the State Department document was edited. The word Tesla was removed. It now says the $400 million purchase is for, quote, "armored electric vehicles." Musk has been questioned over conflicts of interest in the White House, given he runs six--
10:51 PJ Vogt? Can we slow down on $400 million for Tesla armored vehicles? Like, does Tesla make armored vehicles?
10:57 Speaker 01 No.
10:57 PJ Vogt? Okay.
10:58 Speaker 01 They have a Cybertruck, which, and whether or not it's armored or even, you know, bulletproof is very, very questionable. There's this famous incident in 2019 when Elon Musk brought one of his executives onstage to demonstrate to the world how bulletproof it was and threw a metal ball at the window, and it cracked.
11:15 PJ Vogt? I know many people are familiar with this clip, but let's just watch it together one more time because it represents nearly perfect, unscripted comedy. It's 2019, and we're at a fairly infamous product presentation for the then-new Cybertruck.
11:29 Speaker 03 Welcome to the Cybertruck unveil.
11:37 Speaker 03 I love you guys, too. I love you guys, too.
11:39 PJ Vogt? On a stage filled with fog, laser lights, and jets of flame, the aesthetic halfway between Tron and American Gladiator, Elon, in a black leather jacket, here to give the world its first glimpse of the future.
11:51 Speaker 03 So I present to you the Cybertruck.
11:59 PJ Vogt? Encountered in the real world, I tend to think Cybertrucks look like computer mice from the 1980s. But onstage here, I have to say, it does look pretty futuristic and cool. And now comes a moment of real showmanship. A Tesla employee, holding a metal ball, is about to try to prove Elon Musk's claim that the Cybertruck's so-called "armor glass windows" are essentially indestructible.
12:22 Speaker 03 Franz, could you try to break this glass, please?
12:27 PJ Vogt? Franz, a very buff individual, winds up to throw the metal ball. Sure?
12:32 Speaker 03 Yeah.
12:35 Speaker 03 Oh, my fucking god. Well, maybe that was a little too hard.
12:43 PJ Vogt? Elon Musk, making a big promise that turns out not to be rigorously empirically true, as this shattered glass in his car fact checks him the way only physics really can.
12:53 Speaker 03 Room for improvement.
12:55 PJ Vogt? On stage in 2019, Musk quickly rebounds.
12:58 Speaker 03 We would actually throw everything. We threw wrenches. We threw everything. We even literally threw the kitchen sink at the glass, and it didn't break. For some weird reason, it broke now. I don't know why. You know, just fix it in post.
13:14 PJ Vogt? I feel like this was a moment where Elon had not yet completed his arc as like, he was a person more liked in more quarters, but people were starting to sort of tire of his braggadocio. And just, it was a moment where I was like, oh, Elon Musk has become a popular target for schadenfreude. Like, people really, really enjoyed it.
13:35 Speaker 01 Yeah. And it was just like, proof of concept. What Elon says is often exaggerated and sometimes just like, straight up a lie, right? I mean, it's like, what better illustration of that than a quote-unquote "bulletproof" window breaking when you throw a ball at it? Just amazing. But yeah, $400 million for armored Teslas, as you mentioned, something that doesn't even exist. And that's like, half a billion dollars of taxpayer money. What?
13:59 PJ Vogt? It just didn't make any sense. At this point, the story was still in its first 24 hours. Bobby didn't yet even know what the State Department was planning to use $400 million worth of Teslas for. Sometimes it's hard to tell, when you're talking about money the government spends, what constitutes a lot of money. This, here, a lot.
14:22 Speaker 01 To give you some perspective of how much money this is, multiple people I talked to as part of this reporting were like, that might be enough money to replace the entire fleet of vehicles that State Department
14:32 PJ Vogt? Oh, wow.
14:33 Speaker 01 personnel use around the world. There's like 3,000 armored vehicles. And if you do the back of the envelope math, this potentially could swap every, say, Mercedes Benz or BMW that's armored with a Cybertruck.
14:45 PJ Vogt? I mean, it's also surprising because Elon's public stance for the past few months has been the US government wastes so much money. I'm going to lead an office called DOGE, Department of Government Efficiency, and I'm going to find all the places that your taxpayer money is being squandered, either by inept bureaucrats or corrupt ones. And it's really surprising, if you take him at his word, that the same person who is publicly making the argument for this is standing to benefit from this thing that's very good for Tesla, but questionably good right now for the US government.
15:23 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, when it comes to hypocrisies, people have many examples to point to with Musk and his DOGE work. But this is like a shining, fat, glaring one.
15:38 PJ Vogt? We're going to return to this Tesla mystery. But I just want to pause a moment to think about DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, which Elon Musk has been the public face up. DOGE has been, for me at least, the most surprising, strange part of the early days of the second Trump administration. There's what Musk says he wants to do with it, cut government waste, an idea nearly everybody supports in theory. But then there's what he's actually doing, which even the smart people I talked to, who usually see the things I can't, they seem very confused by. What's actually going on here? Here's how I've been trying to make sense of it. A few years ago, when I was covering crypto, crypto people would sometimes tell me I had to read this strange online conservative blogger named Curtis Yarvin.
16:23 Speaker 01 Curtis Yarvin is this software developer dude who has a huge online following. He became like a big figure, I think it's called like the Dark Enlightenment Movement.
16:35 PJ Vogt? Yes.
16:35 Speaker 01 And they kind of pushed for authoritarianism, essentially. And he's often pushed for this, like, I think the acronym is like RAGE, like retire all government employees, which is almost like a proto Doge kind of thing.
16:48 PJ Vogt? Yeah.
16:48 Speaker 01 He's become someone that a lot of Silicon Valley types, libertarian types, anti-government types have rallied around and held up as this kind of like intellectual leader.
16:58 PJ Vogt? Yarvin has said this country would be better off as a monarchy instead of a democracy. J.D. Vance has talked about being influenced by Yarvin, as have a few Silicon Valley people close to the administration, Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel. And Curtis Yarvin is an Elon fan. On a podcast appearance in 2021, Yarvin said his criticism of Musk, the reason he could never run the country, was just where he was born.
17:22 Speaker 04 The knock I have on Elon Musk is that he was born in South Africa, so he was not actually eligible.
17:27 PJ Vogt? But Yarvin went on to say he'd still imagine Musk being useful in the kind of revolution he was hoping for, getting rid of the people he couldn't stand.
17:33 Speaker 04 You have these kind of old boomers like Bolton and Barr.
17:36 PJ Vogt? The people who slowed down Donald Trump.
17:38 Speaker 04 You know, if you put Elon Musk in the White House, you shouldn't even deal with these people, he should just blow up all the agencies go around them.
17:43 PJ Vogt? I should say, as far as I know, Elon Musk has never mentioned Yarvin's name publicly, and maybe he's arrived at similar ideas on his own. But when Elon talks about how the government should work, I hear echoes of Yarvin. Back in August 2024, in the weeks after the attempted assassination on Trump, Elon sat for an interview with Lex Friedman.
18:03 Speaker 05 This is the longest podcast I've ever done. It's a fascinating, super technical and wide-ranging conversation.
18:10 PJ Vogt? This podcast episode is eight and a half hours long, meaning the rare podcast you could both fall asleep and wake up to. Among other things, many other things, Elon talks about his admiration for Trump, especially in the wake of this attempt on his life.
18:25 Speaker 03 And I thought Trump displayed courage under fire, objectively.
18:31 Speaker 03 You know, he's just got shot. It's got blood streaming down his face and he's like fist pumping, saying fight, you know, like that's impressive. Like you can't feign bravery in a situation.
18:42 PJ Vogt? Later in the interview, you hear the seeds of Doge. Elon starts musing about how the government is totally broken and how someone needs to go in there and start throwing out all the excessive rules.
18:53 Speaker 03 There has to be a sort of a garbage collection for laws and regulations so that you you don't keep accumulating laws and regulations to the point where you can't do anything. This is why we can't build a high-speed rail in America. It's illegal. That's the issue. It's illegal six ways to Sunday to build high-speed rail in America.
19:15 Speaker 05 I wish you could just like for a week go into Washington and like be the head of the committee for making, what is it, for the garbage collection, making government smaller, like removing stuff.
19:29 Speaker 03 I have discussed with Trump the idea of a government efficiency commission.
19:33 Speaker 05 Nice. Yeah.
19:35 Speaker 03 And I would be willing to be part of that commission.
19:40 PJ Vogt? These two in a contest to see who can bring less affect to an interview and somehow both winning. Later that month, in a live stream conversation on X, Musk is now interviewing Trump and you can actually hear him pitching the idea.
19:54 Speaker 03 I think it'd be great to just have a government efficiency commission that takes a look at these things and and just ensures that the taxpayer money, the taxpayers' hard-earned money is spent in a good way. And I'd be happy to help out on such a commission.
20:11 Speaker 04 I'd love it.
20:11 Speaker 03 If it were formed.
20:12 Speaker 04 Well, you, you're the greatest cutter. I mean, I look at what you do. You walk in and you just say, you want to quit? They go on strike. I won't mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, that's okay. You're all gone. You're all gone. So every one of you is gone and you are the greatest. You would be very good. Oh, you would love it. But you know, if you look at our
20:31 Speaker 03 Well, I'd be happy to help out.
20:32 Speaker 04 By the way, congratulations. I just looked at the number of people that are listening to you and I chat. We'll call it a chat. But congratulations. This is very good. I mean, it's great. It's
20:43 Speaker 05 And you're an interesting character, you know, the.
20:47 PJ Vogt? The way they're talking to each other is striking. Two powerful people just admiring each other's power. Musk, who has said, America needs a better CEO. Trump, who not long after this will describe himself as a king. A month after that conversation in September, Trump announces the creation of a new government task force.
21:06 Speaker 05 That the suggestion of Elon Musk, who has given me his complete and total endorsement. It's nice, smart guy. He knows what he's doing. He knows what he's doing. It's very, very much appreciated. I will create a government efficiency commission task with conducting a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government and making recommendations for drastic reforms. Need to do it. Can't go on the way we are now.
21:39 PJ Vogt? When Trump took office, which believe it or not, was just seven weeks ago, suddenly there was something called Doge. And suddenly lots of federal workers were getting emails from Elon Musk, telling them they were no longer employed. Bobby says the speed of it all surprised a lot of people.
21:54 Speaker 01 I won't name them, but I have some colleagues who are older than me, who thought it was Do- Do- Doggy. And I had to be like, no, it's not Doggy, it's Doge. I think there is, there is some kind of generational element to it. I think some people who aren't on the internet as much as you and I are, may have missed the pronunciation and what it's a nod to. So, I mean, everyone thought it was going to be a little bit more incremental, a little bit more gradual, and that they would maybe go before Congress and say, hey, here's a bunch of spending that USAID does abroad. We want to cut like 20% of it. That would be like a front page story on the New York Times, right? But instead, instead of being like a blue ribbon commission, I mean, he has just moved
22:35 Speaker 01 the office of Doge into the White House and just dismantling entire agencies, just, just knocking things down to the studs completely. So, nobody envisioned, and I talked to colleagues of mine who, who covered the Trump campaign, nobody envisioned exactly this kind of incredibly influential, totally unchecked role that Elon would be playing. It's, it's why people jokingly say, you know, it used to be Elon was a shadow VP. Now people are saying, you know, President Musk, because he just has an incredible amount of power here.
23:08 PJ Vogt? Musk does have a lot of power. How you feel about that probably has more to do with how you feel about Elon Musk than anything else. If you think, like many Americans do, that the government is bloated and inefficient, and if you believe, as many others do, that Elon Musk is a genius, then he's not destroying democracy. He's destroying bureaucracy. For others, though, this feels unsettling. And one way Musk has tried to win some public confidence is by making the case for why Americans should trust him. Most memorably for me, in this unusual Oval Office press conference.
23:42 Speaker 01 X, are you OK? This is X, and he's a great guy, high IQ. There was this very—I can't help but laugh because the image is just so funny. But this very funny press conference in the Oval Office in which Trump was seated at his desk, and then Musk was there with his kid on his shoulders and sometimes on the ground, and they were talking about Doge. And we're going to be signing a very important deal today. It's Doge, and I'm going to ask Elon to tell you a little bit about it and some of the things that we found, which is shocking.
24:23 PJ Vogt? Trump hands off to Elon, who's in a black overcoat, black MAGA hat, and who tells the reporters the aim of his new government project.
24:31 Speaker 03 At a high level, you say, what is the goal of Doge or more, and I think a significant part of the presidency is to restore democracy.
24:43 PJ Vogt? Musk's message here, delivered over the murmurs of his child, is much more publicly palatable than Curtis Yarvin's. He's not saying we should get rid of democracy. He's saying instead that the real impediment to the will of the people is all the cruft of bureaucracy and regulation that make it so that our government costs lots of money but doesn't run well enough to do the things voters want. Musk's solution, so far, is to just gleefully delete lots of parts of the US government. Of course, that is the same government that also regulates his companies, sometimes gives him subsidies. And a reporter in the room asks him, isn't it a problem that you have this much power over a government that you also do business with? Is there any sort of accountability check and balance in
25:28 Speaker 03 That would provide any transparency for the American people. Well, all of our actions are fully public. So if you see anything, you say like, wait a second, hey, that does, that seems like maybe that's, you know, that there's a conflict there. I, I, it's not like people are going to be shy about saying that. They'll say it immediately. Including you yourself? Yes, but it's, we're transparency is what builds trust, not simply somebody asserting trust. So not somebody saying they're trustworthy, but transparency. So you can see everything that's going on. And you can see, am I doing something that benefits one of my companies or not? It's totally obvious.
26:05 PJ Vogt? As evidence of his commitment to transparency, Elon says he's even created a website you can visit. Doge.gov/savings. A long, frequently updated list of everything he says he's cut to save taxpayer money. I looked at it with Bobby. Can you describe what it looks like?
26:22 Speaker 01 Sure. So we have a gold money sign. It says Department of Government Efficiency. If this were a real government department, I'm not sure that we'd have this like crypto looking money sign as the icon, but there it is.
26:36 PJ Vogt? Yeah.
26:36 Speaker 01 Right, right next to that, it has a little American flag and it says, "An official website of the United States government." Okay, so it sounds official. It says, "Estimated savings $105 billion." "Amount saved per taxpayer," it says $652.17. So there you go, PJ. According to Elon, Doge has already saved both of us 652 bucks. All right.
26:58 PJ Vogt? So, okay, so then you scroll down and there's like a long list. It, it looks like a credit card statement in reverse because it's like places where money's being spent. Literally the location and then the amount. And can you like, just talk to me about one of these line items?
27:14 Speaker 01 Okay. So one savings that Musk has boasted about is canceling a $9 million payment to Reuters. So the news agency for large scale social deception, right? And Musk has presented this as some sort of smoking gun that the government was paying Reuters to deceive people, right? But when reporters actually looked into this, first of all, it wasn't Reuters, the news agency, but was Thomas Reuters Special Service, which is like a data and research arm of Reuters, totally separate company.
27:47 PJ Vogt? Huh.
27:47 Speaker 01 And the Defense Department had a contract with them to fight against social deception.
27:53 PJ Vogt? And the kicker is, the contract was actually signed in Trump's first term. Oh, wow. Okay, okay. But so if you're like, someone who is predisposed to Musk worldview, and you're somebody who feels like the media is liberal, which I don't disagree with, but you feel like the media is literally working with Democrats to lie to people, which is something I do disagree with, like, this looks like at some point, Joe Biden was like, we need to pay Reuters, the news agency, money to deceive people, give them the money, and we'll write them in the budget, and Musk went through and was like, this is wrong, and like, if you take him at his word, this is what you think happened.
28:32 Speaker 01 Exactly right. And look, by the time the fact checkers come out and say, hey, guys, this actually is a terrible example of wasteful spending for all of these reasons, the news cycle has already moved on, and Musk is already promoting some other savings.
28:47 Speaker 01 There's so many just absurdities when you really look at it carefully, but again, I think to Elon, what really matters is just, you know, just having sort of daily headlines being generated about doing something. Because to most Trump fans and people who love Elon, no matter how the media covers it, the media isn't to be trusted. So if the media's out here truth squatting all these contracts, no, we're gonna scold you. No, it is not a $5 billion contract. It is a $5 million contract. I don't know, some fans of Elon Musk might be like, well, at least we're saving $5 million, you know, like, sometimes there's like a journalistic win, but it's like, to their supporters, I don't know that that's changing any minds.
29:35 PJ Vogt? Honestly, all these fact checks, they probably weren't. Polling published just this week shows that a majority of Americans support Doge. 54% say it should influence government spending, 51% approve of Trump's cuts to federal agencies, and more people say Musk is cutting waste than disagree.
29:55 PJ Vogt? Which means if you're a Doge skeptic, you're actually in the minority. But that's also why the story about the State Department Teslas seems to Bobby like such an obviously big deal. If Trump's State Department was planning to send $400 million to Tesla, that sure looks like, at best, waste, at worst, corruption. The problems Elon's Doge Commission had promised to eradicate. That's how it looked. But there wasn't yet any proof. After a short break, an anonymous source reaches out to Bobby Allen.
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33:08 PJ Vogt? Welcome back to the show. So that press conference with Musk in the Oval Office explaining that the glare of public attention would keep him honest? That happened in early February, the day before Ryan Grim's story about the mysterious $400 million Tesla line item was published. Once that story's out, we know what happens. Elon says it's a lie, the word Tesla magically disappears from a government website, and then Bobby's NPR story comes out, and Trump's State Department finally issues a public response.
33:40 Speaker 01 They issue this bullet point statement that's basically like, oh yeah, this is something that started in the Biden administration. So they're pointing a finger at the Biden White House, the Biden State Department. And they basically suggest, oh, well, this was a Biden thing. We're getting rid of it. We're not going to move forward. I think the language they used was it's indefinitely on hold, whatever that means, but they have no plans to pursue it.
34:04 PJ Vogt? So the subtext is both this wasn't our call. You guys leapt to the conclusion that this looks like perhaps a kind of self dealing. This is something the Biden administration did and we're not even fulfilling it. This was like, you guys are mad at Trump. You should be mad at Biden, like the egg's on your face journalists.
34:19 Speaker 01 That's right. Yeah.
34:21 PJ Vogt? At this point, it felt a lot like the story was done. If the State Department's telling the truth and it was Joe Biden's people who initiated this Tesla deal, then no one thinks there's a conflict of interest here. At this point, Bobby's curiosity was still alive, but it wasn't clear what he could do with it.
34:37 Speaker 01 In my position, I don't have access to these confidential State Department records. So when the State Department issues a statement saying, here is our explanation, I, correspondent for NPR, have to update my story saying, here's the State Department's explanation. And that's what I did. I was like, they're pointing at Biden and they're saying it's over with. We are expunging this from the spreadsheet. Nothing to see here, folks.
35:02 PJ Vogt? And so as like a rule following journalist for NPR, it's like the government has made a statement. We know that when the government makes a statement, you put in the story. As like a human being, student of the internet and follower of Elon Musk made statements, what were you thinking as a person?
35:16 Speaker 01 It didn't exactly pass the sniff test for so many different reasons, but again, I don't have the access they have. And so, you know, an investigative reporter might say, okay, we'll just file a FOIA. But in this Trump era, most reporters are assuming FOIAs are just going to be dead in the water. So I was like, okay, cool. Yeah, I'll file this FOIA. Maybe I'll get a response like three years from now that it's been delayed. But I'm a breaking news reporter. I'm interested in Elon. I'm interested in tech. I'm interested in what Musk is doing in the White House. I want an answer now. So I'm just making as many calls as I can. I'm trying to dig around. And then finally, something lands in my inbox and it came in the form of an anonymous
36:01 Speaker 01 reader complaining about my story. And, and let me just say, when you work at a national news organization and you do stories about divisive figures like Trump and Musk, these kinds of complaints are legion. I mean, all the time. I'm sure you get them too, PJ. It's just, they're constant. So I just took a deep breath and I go, okay, another one of these.
36:20 PJ Vogt? Can you, can you read the email?
36:22 Speaker 01 Uh, sure. Let me, um, let me pull it up. And again, this came in from a person who was not willing to identify themselves. Okay. This person says, "You mentioned that the White House says the contract had been started under the Biden administration. This is not true. The State Department was a laggard in federal fleet electrification and reluctant to acquire any, never mind the necessary charging infrastructure. They had no money for this."
37:00 PJ Vogt? Bobby only read a part of this email to protect the identity of his source, but essentially the source was saying they'd had real knowledge of the actual plans for how Biden's State Department planned to spend money in 2025. And those plans did not involve sending $400 million to Tesla.
37:18 Speaker 01 And so after reading this, I thought, this is not just somebody carping to me. It's someone who seems to be suggesting they were in the Biden White House and they, better than anyone I could imagine, would be in a position to know that this is BS and that when Trump suggests that this whole thing started in the Biden administration, this person might be able to definitively prove that is not the case. And I was super excited to get this person on the phone, but they weren't so excited to talk to me.
37:51 PJ Vogt? What ensues is days of the wheedling, behind the scenes conversations that are the most boring, but consequential parts of being a reporter. And in the end, the source agrees to send the document to Bobby. Actually, it gets picked up by an intermediary. But Bobby finally gets the document, this shred of proof he was looking for. How do you feel?
38:10 Speaker 01 Oh, it was amazing. I just like, you know, poured a hot cup of coffee, sat down, pushed this thing on my, my two monitors, my work at home station. And then I was like, oh, wait, it's only seven pages. Oh, well. It's not going to take very long to read this. I can do it pretty quickly. But the important, big revelation, if that's what you want to call it, in this document is that the Biden administration had set aside $483,000 for buying EVs this year, which obviously is very different than 400 million.
38:49 PJ Vogt? And this, this document, just like, um, is it something you can read from? Is it just like a spreadsheet?
38:54 Speaker 01 Totally, yeah. It's a government document. And this felt like I like, you know, Christmas came early or something. It says for Bobby Allen dot PDF. How exciting. Okay, click. And I scrolled down and it's a government document that the State Department sent to the White House, being like, hey, we know you officials working under Biden have all of these electric vehicle requirements and standards and goals. We know that you want us to put some money aside to fulfill some of these goals. Here is our plan. Here are our concerns. Here's the amount of money we want to throw at it. And yeah, it was like 400 and some thousand dollars to buy some EVs for the State Department. And then there was this other little box. I mean, the first thing I did, actually PJ, when I got this document was Ctrl F Tesla.
39:39 Speaker 01 Like, that was number one.
39:41 PJ Vogt? Oh, interesting.
39:43 Speaker 01 And so when I, when I did that, it brought me to this box. And when I click Tesla, there is so much lingo, right? But it basically says, there's been a request to collect information about capabilities from industry. It's received one response, Tesla in parentheses, which the AV program is reviewing. That's armored vehicle.
40:05 PJ Vogt? So here Bobby could actually see what Biden's State Department's intentions had been to set aside a relatively small amount of money to explore the possibility of making electric some of the armored cars that diplomats and other employees used to get around in places that could be dangerous.
40:22 Speaker 01 So right now, if you're a Foreign Service worker or like an ambassador in like Mogadishu and you're going from a meeting site, you know, back to the embassy, you'll have a car that's paid for by taxpayers. Typically, it's a car that was built to be armored. It's a super, super secure car and it'll drive you from point A to point B. And what everything we're talking about here is about is there was a push and the Biden administration to just like start thinking about the United States' global footprint when it comes to our use of combustion engines and, you know, how can we maybe replace some of them with EVs? And so this is where this initiative is coming from. Like, oh, maybe one day down the road, like really far down the road when the technology really advances and everyone has charging stations.
41:03 PJ Vogt? Yeah, because you'd assume that a lot of places where diplomats are driving around in armored cars are not going to have Tesla superchargers every X amount of miles.
41:11 Speaker 01 Totally, totally, totally. Yeah, especially in remote, conflict-torn parts of the world. I mean, you're not going to find a Tesla charging station. But it was this idea of just like, let's start looking into it. And because Tesla is the biggest electric field company, they're like, let's start engaging Tesla about that.
41:30 PJ Vogt? To be honest with you, I genuinely don't know whether our federal fleet of armored diplomatic vehicles should be electric or gas. I don't know if it's a good idea to spend $400,000-ish looking into it. If you were the head of Doge, looking for cuts, you could convince me that this was a decent one to make. $400,000, back to the taxpayer. But instead, what happened is that $400,000-ish was turned into $400 million and earmarked for Tesla specifically. Tesla, a company which does not make armored vehicles and whose car windows did break that time Franz threw a big ball at them.
42:10 PJ Vogt? I digress. Bobby had the document proving that the $400 million line item had not originated under Joe Biden. It had originated under Trump. Bobby verified the document by finding other people who worked on that forecast. And now he had a new story. So he writes it up. He asked the State Department to provide a response and gets one.
42:29 Speaker 01 But their response was super underwhelming. So the State Department writes me and it says, "The numbers provided in the document were an estimate. As mentioned, this was a request for information, not a solicitation for a contract. The RFI, Request for Information, was strictly to gather information and the Department of State has no intentions to move forward with the solicitation." Which is a mouthful, right? But in plain English, as someone who has been obsessed with this story for a little bit, what the State Department is saying here is they're canceling this effort. They're not planning to go forward with it. And in terms of how do they come up with the $400
43:12 Speaker 01 million, they're conceding here it was an estimate. They're not saying by whom or what exactly it was going to purchase or where these Teslas would be sent, but that's what they gave me. And I obviously replied to them with a long list of follow-up questions for a little bit more clarity and got nothing, but that's what they said.
43:33 PJ Vogt? Bobby published his story. And unlike a lot of the fact checks that I've seen come and go in the past couple of months, this one actually got a fair amount of traction. For whatever reason, the idea of focusing on this one obscure, mysterious line item in a procurement forecast, that week, anyway, people seemed able to pay attention. Bobby had a theory as to why that might have been.
43:55 Speaker 01 Every time you put on CNN or MSNBC, you see talking heads fighting about conflicts of interests and potential abuses of power. But here we have a very specific example of that maybe happening. And something about $400 million of taxpayer money paying for Cybertrucks just set people off. I mean, still, my inbox is full of responses. My Signal chats are full of random people reaching out. It's just, I'm getting a flood of people offering their opinion, expressing outrage, or Elon fans attacking me for pointing this out. Yeah, it just, it really did kind of, kind of strike a nerve.
44:35 PJ Vogt? Here's what I know is going to be one of the hardest things about the next four years: holding on to uncertainty, reminding ourselves of everything that we actually don't know. This story, I don't think inspires a lot of trust in Elon Musk in a fair-minded listener, but we actually don't know if he told somebody to give Tesla $400 million, or if some sycophant just made a move that Musk was legitimately unaware of, or what other possibility could have transpired. But what we can know, even with the information we have, is how this administration, how Doge, how Elon Musk handles mistakes. The most good-faith reading of what happened you could draw is that a mistake was made, and when the mistake was made, Elon Musk made accusations.
45:19 PJ Vogt? He said, "There was nothing to see here." He did not say this shouldn't have happened, or explain how it had. And while many reasonable people on the left and right think that the government is bloated and dysfunctional, who could get on board with a scalpel, maybe even a chainsaw, being taken to some of our regulations and bureaucracy, you'd really want to believe that the person doing it was transparent and not sloppy. At a minimum, you'd want to think they're capable of admitting when they're wrong. Even for those of us who are trying to be painfully, annoyingly, open-minded, stories like this offer an uncomfortable amount of certainty about the present realities. You're a journalist, you're a citizen, you're a person who lives on the internet.
46:04 PJ Vogt? Like, everybody else, you're trying to figure out for the next four years, like, how to be saying how much attention to pay, where to put your attention. Do you feel like you learned anything from this reporting experience about that?
46:15 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think I learned, you know, there's a certain amount of cynicism a lot of reporters have sometimes covering Trump and covering Musk, which is like, every day is, someone put it recently, "Every day is a white Bronco day," right? Every day feels like it's OJ speeding on the freeway in his white Bronco. It's like that level of an insane breaking news day.
46:37 PJ Vogt? Yeah.
46:37 Speaker 01 And no matter what you do, or say, or can expose, it's going to wash over by the morning. To be optimistic, I kind of learned that, you know, if you push hard enough, maybe there can be some change, maybe that there can be pressure, maybe the audience will care. It's a very noisy, chaotic world right now, and it's only going to become more so, but... But look, I never thought that millions of people would care about this tiny little line item in a State Department spreadsheet. It sounds pretty boring to me, but it's consequential. It's consequential. So yeah, I think it gives me hope that at least the audience cares about this kind of stuff.
47:19 PJ Vogt? What still is the part of this mystery that we don't know the answer to?
47:24 Speaker 01 What we don't know is who put the $400 million into that document? Was it a Doge worker? Was it a State Department worker? Was it Elon himself? No idea. Big question mark there. So who did this? And equally as puzzling, was this a mistake? Were there zeros added? Or was this really their intention for this to be quietly done? $400 million of taxpayer money for Teslas to be quietly just pushed through? No one would notice? And that would be it? And I'd love a follow-up to be, hey, we found the man or woman who put this in there, and they said it was a mistake, and here's their story. If you're listening and you're that person, let's talk.
48:06 Speaker 01 Because I would love to close that chapter out. But as of now, we just don't know. That's the mystery.
48:22 PJ Vogt? Bobby Allen. He's a tech correspondent for NPR. If you want to listen to his reporting, you can find him on NPR. If you want to help him with his reporting, you can find him on Signal at B A L L Y N dot 77.
48:43 PJ Vogt? We're going to take a short break. And when we come back, I'm going to say the word potato.
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52:25 PJ Vogt? Potato.
52:32 PJ Vogt? Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Shruti Panamaneni, and it's produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John. Fact checking by Holly Patton. Theme, original composition and mixing by Armin Bazarian. Additional production support by Sean Merchant and Kim Kupel. If you'd like to support our show, keep it alive, and get ad-free episodes, zero reruns, and the occasional bonus audio, please consider signing up for incognito mode. You can learn more at searchengine.show. We are also going to have early access to our merch, which is coming out soon, for incognito mode members. Our executive producer is Leah Reese Dennis. Thank you to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Pro, and John Schmidt, and to the team
53:15 PJ Vogt? at Odyssey, J.D. Crowley, Rob Marandy, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Matt Casey, Nora Curran, Josephina Francis, Kirk Courtney, and Hillary Schaaf. Our agent is Orin Rosenbaum at UTA. Follow and listen to Search Engine for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.
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