Elon Musk seems to be in no mood to loosen his grip on federal employees. Since Donald Trump’s election as the American President, Musk has gained significant access within the government. The billionaire has also been given his own Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which primarily aims at cost cutting and therefore justifies rampant firing of federal employees.
According to Musk, these lay-offs are essential because ultimately it’s done so that the tax payers’ money is not wasted. Unfortunately, this is not really true and the Musk-Trump duo is primarily targeting departments that do not align with their views of America.
Most recently, Musk had sent an email to federal government employees on the weekend, which asked them to send him a five point list, specifying what they had done and accomplished in the previous week. Such emails in government departments are mostly unheard of and given the bizarre nature of the email, departments like the FBI and DoD heads had asked their employees to simply ignore it.
Musk had given the employees a deadline of 11:59 p.m. Monday and he also mentioned that failure to respond to that mail would mean resignation. This had put the federal employees in a place of great dilemma as they could not figure out how or why is it necessary to respond to such an email.
Donald Trump had initially shown his support to Musk’s email and said, anyone who did not positively respond to the mail was “semi-fired or fired.” However, within a couple of hours Trump’s own office did not stand by his words and the Office of Personnel Management, from where the email was sent, clarified that responding to the mail was optional and did “not equate to a resignation.”
The email request was utterly trivial, as the standard for passing the test was to type some words and press send!
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… https://t.co/QjSmY4ezpg
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 24, 2025
However, Musk seemed to be quite determined to get a response out of the federal employees and he found support on platform X as well. Matt Walsh, a ‘theocratic fascist’ had posted on the Musk owned platform, “I already had a low opinion of many federal workers but now that I’ve seen them all meltdown and cry because they’re expected to provide the faintest evidence that they’re actually accomplishing anything with the taxpayer funded job we’ve given them, I realize that my opinion of them was still somehow too high.”
Musk retweeted this and added his own response, which said, “The email request was utterly trivial, as the standard for passing the test was to type some words and press send! 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? Makes old Twitter look good. Didn’t think that was possible.”
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He then went on to give another ultimatum to the federal employees saying that he will be giving them another chance for replying to his email and if they fail this time also, it would mean sure termination. Musk also mentioned that this decision has been taken by Trump’s discretionary power, to ensure that his words get added value.
It now remains to be seen how the federal employees respond to Musk’s second ultimatum and if Musk continues on his path of randomly downsizing departments while citing reasons of budget and overspending issues.
