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Confusion and chaos loom as hundreds of thousands of federal employees begin their workweek on Monday facing a deadline from President Donald Trump’s cost-cutting chief, Elon Musk, to explain their recent accomplishments or risk losing their jobs.
Musk’s unusual demand has faced resistance from several key U.S. agencies led by the president’s loyalists — including the FBI, State Department, Homeland Security and the Pentagon — which instructed their employees over the weekend not to comply. Lawmakers in both parties said that Musk’s mandate may be illegal, while unions are threatening to sue.
Trump over the weekend called for Musk to be more aggressive in his cost-cutting crusade through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, and posted a meme on social media mocking federal employees who “cried about Trump and Elon.”
Musk’s team sent an email to hundreds of thousands of federal employees on Saturday giving them roughly 48 hours to report five specific things they had accomplished last week. In a separate message on X, Musk said any employee who failed to respond by the deadline — set in the email as 11:59 p.m. EST Monday — would lose their job.
Mass confusion followed on the eve of the deadline as some agencies resisted the order, others encouraged their workers to comply, and still others offered conflicting guidance.
One message on Sunday morning from the Department of Health and Human Services, led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., instructed its roughly 80,000 employees to comply. That was shortly after the acting general counsel, Sean Keveney, had instructed some not to. And by Sunday evening, agency leadership issued new instructions that employees should “pause activities” related to the request until noon on Monday.
“I’ll be candid with you. Having put in over 70 hours of work last week advancing Administration’s priorities, I was personally insulted to receive the below email,” Keveney said in an email viewed by The Associated Press that acknowledged a broad sense of “uncertainty and stress” within the agency.
Keveney laid out security concerns and pointed out some of the work done by the agency’s employees may be protected by attorney-client privilege: “I have received no assurances that there are appropriate protections in place to safeguard responses to this email.”
Democrats and even some Republicans, including Sen. John Curtis, R-Utah, were critical of Musk’s ultimatum.
“If I could say one thing to Elon Musk, it’s like, please put a dose of compassion in this,” Curtis, whose state has 33,000 federal employees, said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “These are real people. These are real lives. These are mortgages. … It’s a false narrative to say we have to cut and you have to be cruel to do it as well.”
Newly confirmed FBI Director Kash Patel, an outspoken Trump ally, instructed employees to ignore Musk’s request, at least for now.
“The FBI, through the Office of the Director, is in charge of all of our review processes, and will conduct reviews in accordance with FBI procedures,” Patel wrote in an email confirmed by the AP. “When and if further information is required, we will coordinate the responses. For now, please pause any responses.”
Ed Martin, interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, sent his staff a message Sunday that may have caused more confusion.
“Let me clarify: We will comply with this OPM request whether by replying or deciding not to reply,” Martin wrote in the email obtained by the AP, referring to the Office of Personnel Management.
“Please make a good faith effort to reply and list your activities (or not, as you prefer), and I will, as I mentioned, have your back regarding any confusion,” Martin continued. “We can do this.”
Officials at the Departments of State, Defense and Homeland Security were more consistent.
Tibor Nagy, acting undersecretary of state for management, told employees in an email that department leadership would respond on behalf of workers.
“No employee is obligated to report their activities outside of their Department chain of command,” Nagy wrote in an email.
Pentagon leadership instructed employees to “pause” any response to Musk’s team, according to an email from Jules Hurst, the deputy undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness.
The Homeland Security Department, meanwhile, told employees that “no reporting action from you is needed at this time” and that agency managers would respond, according to an email from R.D. Alles, deputy undersecretary for management.
Thousands of government employees have already been forced out of the federal workforce — either by being fired or through a “deferred resignation” offer — during the first month of Trump’s second term. There is no official figure available for the total firings or layoffs so far, but the AP has tallied hundreds of thousands of workers who are being affected. Many work outside of Washington.
Musk on Sunday called his latest request “a very basic pulse check.”
“The reason this matters is that a significant number of people who are supposed to be working for the government are doing so little work that they are not checking their email at all!” Musk wrote on X. “In some cases, we believe non-existent people or the identities of dead people are being used to collect paychecks. In other words, there is outright fraud.”
He has provided no evidence of such fraud. Separately, Musk and Trump have falsely claimed in recent days that tens of millions of dead people over 100 years old are receiving Social Security payments.
Meanwhile, thousands of other employees are preparing to leave the federal workforce this coming week, including probationary civilian workers at the Pentagon and all but a fraction of U.S. Agency for International Development staffers through cuts or leave.
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I missed Musk’s confirmation hearings.
“Consistent with President @realDonaldTrump’s instructions…” Musk doesn’t work for DOGE. The request is straight from DOGE and President Donald Trump. Spokespeople don’t need confirmations.
Phil – literally the next day Trump stated in the interview that Musk ran DOGE.
The same interview where musk talked over Trump for an hour
Phil: you need a basic civics refresher course. It’d go something like this:
Winning presidential candidates are expected to try to get their budgetary platforms adopted. That process is called appropriations. For fiscal years. Which run July 1-June 30. Money currently being spent, is contained in an appropriations bill passed by Congress and signed by the president (or in rare cases vetoed by a president, and overridden or otherwise compromised to get a presidential signature). The Executive Branch doesn’t get to unilaterally alter appropriations.
I expect the President to fight for his budgetary priorities. On appropriations bills for the next budget. And I imagine he’ll be pretty successful.
Presidents. Are not Kings.
Sorry. Fiscal year is Oct. 1-Sept. 30.
I agree with Joe. Philip, are you serious? You think Musk should be able to run around and do whatever he wants with no accountability. Musk, Trump and JD Vance all need to go. They are a cancer on this nation. I used to vote Republican, but that was when we were fiscal conservatives with a strong defense. Now this whole thing is a like a circus, or a really bad dream…
I’m serious. Anyone who thinks the last four years were preferable -IN ANY WAY – your tears soothe me in delight. Maybe you should give it six more months before you stomp around some more like children. Corruption/Extreme Waste exists and you all know it. Blaming the messenger is fruitless as you turn away from the real fraud. It has been just 30 days. TDS and EMS infected all of you.
GROK 3: Elon Musk does not “run” the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in the traditional sense of being employed as a full-time government official or holding a formal salaried position. Instead, he has been appointed by President Donald Trump to lead DOGE alongside Vivek Ramaswamy. This role was established through an executive order issued by Trump on January 20, 2025, his first day in office, with the goal of reducing federal spending and bureaucracy.
DOGE is not an official cabinet-level department but operates within the Executive Office of the President, essentially renaming the existing U.S. Digital Service. Musk is classified as a “special government employee” (SGE), a designation for individuals who work for the government for 130 days or less in a year, often unpaid, to provide outside expertise. As an unpaid SGE, Musk is not required to file public financial disclosure reports, and he has stated he is not being paid for this role, framing it as a voluntary effort to serve the American public.
Phillip, this has nothing to do with fraud and waste. If it had to do with fraud and waste, armies of accountants and auditors would have descended to do analysis, not kid programmers who don’t know the languages they’re analyzing because they’re older than their parents and make rookie mistakes like “150 year old people are getting Social Security!”.
There is absolutely no reason that Musk can’t walk in, spend 30-60 days to actually learn what’s happening, then issue a report with recommendations to Congress for what they should include in their big, beautiful bill as far as cuts. Give us a real report of all the extreme waste and corruption. Not some garbage that you roll out on Fox News and, surprise surprise, the numbers don’t add up.
Firing a bunch of folks just because they happened to get promoted and happen to be in a “probationary” period is callous beyond belief. Then again, when you take so many drugs that your lawyers wouldn’t let you get anywhere near a security clearance, perhaps you’re just numb to others.
“One of the laid off IRS employees, Robert McCabe, told NBC10 he went into work on Thursday and had issues logging in. He and his coworker sat around and waited for instructions. He then received the layoff letter shortly before 11:30 a.m. McCabe said he had been a supporter of President Trump prior to the layoff.
“You know when he talks about government waste and all that, yes, I’m behind it,” McCabe said. “I believe there is a lot of stuff in the government that needs fixing. And that’s part of the reason why I actually wanted to work for the government, actually. To help change. Help change the things that are wrong in the world, you know? I thought that someone with his business acumen would have come in with a fine-tooth comb and actually found it instead of coming in with a wrecking ball and destroying people’s lives for no reason.”
Glad you’re enjoying Robert’s tears, Philip.
https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/philadelphia-irs-layoffs-firings-union-president-trump/4114738/
It’s not necessarily “what” they’re doing, but “how” they’re doing it.
“There is absolutely no reason that Musk can’t walk in,…” he is doing it – orders from the President of the United States (pretty top level stuff, right?) and will keep on doing it. President says so. Sorry. It will sort out, but waste, fraud, and overspending will be dealt with the best it can in four years.
Can you even provide concrete, verified examples of “waste, fraud, and overspending” being dealt with? When the debt continues to go up because of Trump’s tax cut plans for his billionaire friends but the economy also tanks because of the largest layoffs in the history of this country, we’ll have folks like you to thank. One can only hope a serious, good-faith actor is able to clean up the mess that we’ll be in after four years of this Russian agent’s abuses of power.
Philip, that’s not how it works.
You don’t fire FAA employees and let some planes crash and let it sort out.
You don’t get rid of the folks looking at nuclear weapons and figure out afterwards that, oh geez, no one is looking after our bombs.
You don’t fire food inspectors and let there be some major incidents of people getting sick and let it sort out.
The absolute last thing the world at large needs is the Silicon Valley attitude that you move fast and break stuff and “oh well, sucks to be them”. That’s fine with private companies, and employees / investors who know the risk going in and opt into it. You can’t do that with people’s lives on the line. That’s why the idea that you should “run government like a business” is such a fallacy.
Meausre twice, cut once will always remain good advice.
The waste, fraud and overspending are already on the table. FACTS! Because you’re delusional is not the rest of our problem. Grow up.
What planes crashed? What bombs? Who got sick?
You are a conspiracy theorist!
Crazy people on IBJ.
Unable to provide any actual facts or data to support your position so you resort to attacking character. Classic MAGAt behavior.
You’re projecting, Phillip. Get out of your bubble.
Unable to provide the opposite. Classic TDS. There is no pill for that or hormone therapy either.
No mis/overspending/misallocation/DEI spending overreach/foreign hilarious BS funding? Really? You’re falling on that sword?
I’m good. Your bubble is HUGE! Seismic in scope. Wait it out for 6 months… let’s revisit.
Be specific, Philip.
I tend to think that properly staffing the FAA is a proper and needed use of government funding and, given the longstanding inability to have enough employees, cutting any single one without analysis first is a mistake.
DOGE fired over 100 on that probationary technicality and we are supposed to believe they’re not needed, based on what a drug a user has to say. I tend to believe the people who do the work over people with a history of lying.
Go on.
Phillip- please also review the different Articles of the Constitution, the process of Congressional appropriations and the meaning of impoundment.
You sound desperate. I’m not. I have time on my hands. Cut spending, jobs, waste, fraud, PROSECUTE – all of it. FOUR MORE YEARS! 🤣😎