Elon Musk’s month-long rampage through the US federal bureaucracy met its first real test over the weekend, as some of President Donald Trump’s top loyalists flatly rejected the billionaire’s demand that their employees justify their jobs or be summarily fired.
By Monday, just 48 hours after an email from Musk with the subject line “What did you do last week?” landed in the email boxes of millions of federal workers, personnel officials proclaimed the “request” to be voluntary even as Musk renewed his demand. Several agencies quickly sent out emails telling their employees they did not need to provide the five bullet points about their activity that Musk wanted.
“There is no HHS expectation that HHS employees respond to OPM, and there is no impact to your employment with the agency if you choose not to respond,” said an email sent to employees at the Department of Health and Human Services, referring to the agency that sent Musk’s request, the Office of Personnel Management.
The HHS email added that anyone who wanted to respond should “assume that what you write will be read by malign foreign actors and tailor your response accordingly”.
At virtually the same time, Trump weighed in during the visit of French president Emmanuel Macron, praising Musk’s demand as “genius” and saying that employees who did not respond would be “semi-fired” or “fired”.
Many federal workers were left confused by the flip-flopping, but for the first time since the beginning of Trump’s return to power, government employees appeared to fend off – at least for now – an ambush in the war between the world’s richest man and the federal workforce.
Late on Monday, Musk offered another twist on his social media site.
“Subject to the discretion of the President, they will be given another chance,” Musk wrote on X, apparently referring to federal employees who did not respond to his email by his original deadline of Monday at midnight. “Failure to respond a second time will result in termination.”
“The email request was utterly trivial, as the standard for passing the test was to type some words and press send!” he said in another post. “Yet so many failed even that inane test, urged on in some cases by their managers. Have you ever witnessed such INCOMPETENCE and CONTEMPT for how YOUR TAXES are being spent?”
Also on Monday, the Office of Personnel Management sent out a new memo reiterating the request and the deadline, though allowing agency heads to “exclude personnel from this expectation at their discretion”.
Until the weekend, Trump’s most senior officials had uniformly embraced Musk’s call for a smaller, more efficient government, free of what Republicans call “woke” ideology. Thousands of employees have been fired or put on leave. Entire agencies, like the US Agency for International Development, have been all but shuttered. Remote workers have been told to return to the office or be fired.
But the response to the weekend email suggests that there may in fact be limits to how far Musk, acting on Trump’s behalf as the leader of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), can push the bureaucracy.
Across the executive suites of the federal agencies, the Musk email triggered concerns about turf and security. The message fractured Trump’s cabinet, with the leaders of some departments ordering their employees to comply and others directing workers to ignore the threat.
The responses from several department heads made it clear that they were offended by the idea that an outsider was trying to take over their personnel decisions. Other responses indicated that agency heads were concerned that employees might reveal secret or even classified information in their responses to Musk.
At the CIA, senior officials did not put out a public statement, but some people at the agency were quietly instructed not to respond to Musk’s email in the hopes that the problem would go away, according to a person familiar with the decision.
White House officials denied that there had been any impact on Musk’s authority, or even any dissension among the president’s top officials across the government.
“Everyone is working together as one unified team at the direction of President Trump,” said Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary. “Any notion to the contrary is completely false.”
The dissent among the top ranks of Trump’s administration was rare for a president whose demands for absolute loyalty have resulted in dramatic executive actions by his subordinates, all acting in lockstep to quickly push through Trump’s agenda.
Over the weekend, numerous top officials defied Musk, urging their employees to “pause” or “not respond” to the demand for a description of five things they did the previous week. Employees at the state, defence, energy, homeland security and justice departments were all flatly told not to comply.
“For now, [Department of Energy] employees are asked to please pause on any direct response to the OPM email,” energy secretary Chris Wright said in a weekend email. A top state department official wrote, “No employee is obligated to report their activities outside of their department chain of command.”
At the same time, the president’s handpicked leaders at the Treasury, the General Services Administration, the Department of Transportation and the Office of Management and Budget told employees to follow Musk’s weekend directive. A Treasury email said, “You are directed to respond to this message before the deadline,” adding that “we expect that compliance will not be difficult or time-consuming.” − New York Times
