Elon Musk, the billionaire head of the Trump administration’s Division of Authorities Effectivity, threatened on Saturday to fireplace any federal employee who fails to clarify what work they’ve completed throughout the earlier week.
The menace, issued in a publish on Musk’s social media web site X, was made simply hours after U.S. President Donald Trump posted on his personal social media community Fact Social that DOGE ought to get extra aggressive in its makes an attempt to downsize and reshape the federal workforce.
“All federal workers will shortly obtain an electronic mail requesting to grasp what they acquired performed final week,” Musk posted on X, previously Twitter. “Failure to reply will likely be taken as a resignation.”
As of Saturday night, emails have been despatched to workers at federal companies, together with the Shopper Monetary Safety Bureau, the Nationwide Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention, with the topic line “What did you do final week?”
The e-mail, seen by Reuters, asks workers to answer to the e-mail they’ve acquired with 5 bullet factors summarizing “what you completed at work final week” and duplicate their managers.
The e-mail offers workers till 11:59 p.m. ET on Monday to reply.
It’s unclear what authorized foundation Musk has to terminate federal staff in the event that they fail to reply to his request, which comes amid the Trump administration’s fast-paced and controversial course of to cut back authorities spending by shrinking the federal workforce.
The method, led by Musk and his younger aides on the cost-cutting DOGE, has led to haphazard firings that resulted in quite a few errors and compelled a number of companies to shortly rehire important workers, equivalent to these engaged on nuclear security, defence and energy technology.
The primary wave of job cuts has focused staff who’re simpler to fireplace, equivalent to “probationary” workers on the job for lower than two years or those that have began new roles inside an company.
The indiscriminate firings have led to DOGE terminating individuals whose jobs aren’t funded by taxpayers and have begun to anger individuals throughout the nation who’re involved a couple of lack of providers, in addition to the affect of federal job losses on native economies.
Trump has repeatedly talked about Musk because the purposeful chief of DOGE, which isn’t a cabinet-level division, however the White Home stated in a courtroom submitting earlier this month that Musk had no authority over DOGE and was not an worker of this system.
