WASHINGTON, Feb 23 (Reuters) – Multiple U.S. agencies have told employees not to respond immediately to a demand by President Donald Trump’s adviser Elon Musk to list their accomplishments in the past week or be fired, as a chaotic campaign to cull the federal workforce pushes forward.
Trump administration-appointed officials at the FBI and State Department sent their staff emails telling them not to respond outside their chains of command – a possible sign of tension between members of the Republican administration and the world’s richest person in his campaign to slash the 2.3 million-strong federal civilian workforce.
“The FBI, through the office of the director, is in charge of all our review processes,” said FBI Director Kash Patel, a Trump appointee, in an email to staff seen by Reuters.
Musk leads the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which in the first weeks of Trump’s administration has laid off more than 20,000 workers and offered buyouts to another 75,000, across wide swaths of the government from the Defense Department – long a top Republican priority – to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where all staff members have been ordered to halt work.
The frantic pace has led the federal government in some cases to rush to rehire workers who perform critical functions like securing the nation’s nuclear arsenal and trying to fight the worsening bird flu outbreak, which has caused egg prices to spike.
While there is bipartisan agreement that the U.S. government, which carries $36 trillion in debt, would benefit from reform, Musk’s tumultuous approach has drawn widespread criticism, including from voters in some Republican-dominated areas.
Federal workers on Saturday evening received an email instructing them to detail the work they did during the previous week by 11:59 p.m. ET on Monday (0459 GMT on Tuesday), shortly after Musk posted on his X social media site that failing to respond would be taken as a resignation.
The subject of the email read, “What did you do last week?” and came from a human resources address in the Office of Personnel Management, but did not include Musk’s threat of termination.
Workers at the departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Education and Commerce, as well as at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the National Institutes of Health and the Internal Revenue Service also were told not to respond pending further guidance, according to sources and emails reviewed by Reuters. Workers at intelligence agencies likewise will be told not to respond, according to a source.
“To be clear – this is irregular, unexpected, and warrants further validation,” wrote a senior executive at the National Centers for Environmental Information, an agency that manages environmental data and is part of the Commerce Department.
