Musk defends DOGE email to federal workers

Last week, Elon Musk ruffled a lot of feathers by issuing an email to all federal workers, asking them to bullet point their achievements for the week.

The email resulted in outrage among Democrats, resistance from federal workers, and even a few Trump appointees telling their staff to ignore it. Now Musk is trying to calm the waters.

The Letter

Musk announced the letter on X, saying that in accordance to Donald Trump’s wishes, he had emailed federal workers, giving them until the following Monday to send an email to him to outline what they accomplished for the week.

The kicker to the note was that not answering the letter would be considered a resignation, which was a bit extreme. I talked about this the other day, stating that there is simply no way we should be firing people based on a response to an email. I believe the department heads appointed by Trump should be evaluating talent and positions to make that call.

Tom Spiggle, a veteran labor and employment lawyer, brought up the legal challenges of making such a move, stating, “[Federal workers] have Fifth Amendment due process rights, which is different from those of us in the private sector. And you can’t just fire them willy-nilly. You can fire them, but you have to follow certain procedures. And this is not one of them.

“OPM clearly didn’t follow any rule-making process. They don’t have authority to hire and fire workers outside of their agency, and so in order to be given that authority, there’d have to be a rule-making period, which didn’t happen here.”

Trump Appointees Fire Back

After Musk issued the letter, there was immediate pushback from various directors and secretaries within the Trump administration.

FBI Director Kash Patel pushed back first, telling staffers to ignore the email. Patel went on to say that his office would be the one evaluating staffers and making any decisions in regard to future employment.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard also pushed back, citing national security for the reason her staffers should not be answering the email. Secretary of State Marco Rubio joined the resistance, with his office issuing a letter very similar to Patel’s to tell staffers to ignore the memo by Musk.

At best, this made the administration look disjointed, and the media pounced, with outlets asking the same question that was being asked during the Biden administration… who is running the show?

Musk Defends Letter

Musk’s narrative about the letter has now changed several times, with Musk recently telling Trump’s cabinet that the letter was literally a “pulse check” on federal employees, more or less stating that he wanted to verify that everyone being paid is a real person and phantom checks are not being sent out.

Musk tried to explain, "I think that email was perhaps interpreted as a performance review, but actually it was a pulse check review. Do you have a pulse? And if you have a pulse and two neurons, you could reply to an email."

He added, "But what we are trying to get to the bottom of is we think there are a number of people on the government payroll who are dead, which is probably why they can't respond. And some people who are not real people... like they're fictional individuals that are collecting a paycheck… well, somebody is collecting paychecks on a fictional individual, so we're just literally trying to figure out are these people real, are they alive, and can they write email, which I think is a reasonable expectation."

Musk added that the country must cut spending, and soon, or the United States will go bankrupt. He stated that he needs to find $4 billion in cuts per day, now through September, in order to find the $1 trillion they want to reduce the spending deficit by. Like I have said before, I am all for cutting the size of our government, but I think the email thing was just a bad idea. It should be up to directors and secretaries to audit their departments and make these cuts, at least in my opinion.