Donald Trump says there are one million people with their jobs on the line after they refused to respond to his buddy Elon Musk’s email demanding what they ‘accomplished’ at work.
The president said his team is working to track down those who didn’t send a reply by the deadline.
Speaking with reporters gathered for Trump’s first Cabinet meeting on Wednesday, Trump said Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is seeking to find out why these federal employees did not answer his email.
‘Maybe they’re going to be gone, maybe they’re not around, maybe they have other jobs, maybe they moved and they’re not where they’re supposed to be,’ Trump speculated. ‘A lot of things could have happened.’
‘Right now we’re trying to find out who those people are that haven’t responded.’
But in general, Trump put those workers on notice that they are ‘on the bubble’ – a sports phrase the president is using as a euphemism for their jobs being on the line.
President Donald Trump put 1 million federal employees on notice that they could be fired after they didn’t respond to Elon Musk’s ‘what did you do last week?’ email. Pictured: Trump speaks to reporters during his Cabinet meeting on Wednesday
The email landed in the inbox of 2.3 million federal workers on Saturday night giving a deadline of 11:59 p.m. on Monday to send five bullet points of what they did at work the week prior.
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Alina Habba savages federal workers for not answering Elon Musk's DOGE email
Musk made a post to X on Saturday noting that it would be taken as a resignation if anyone failed to reply.
The directive led to a lot of confusion among the government workforce, especially after some department bosses issued guidance to their employees not to respond to Musk’s email coming from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) HR email account.
Trump insisted on Wednesday that DOGE is being more ‘surgical’ when looking at the number of government employees to fire and which jobs to ultimately cut.
Additionally, he wants different agencies and department heads to begin taking over the job of DOGE and making these cutthroat decisions themselves.
He said that Environmental and Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin has already said he could likely cut 65 percent of the workforce at his department.
Elon Musk attended Trump’s first Cabinet meeting on Wednesday – and told reporters he doesn’t have a specific number of federal employees he wants to fire
The email from Musk’s DOGE came from the human resources department at OPM and hit federal employees’s inboxes on Saturday evening
The president also said that Secretary of State Marco Rubio and others whose departments handle sensitive information are handling the responses to Musk’s email differently than other agencies are expected.
‘Now there’ll be some agencies – like Marco has people within State that are right now doing very classified, very confidential work,’ Trump conceded. ‘And we understand that, we’ve talked and, you know, we’re being a little more surgical.’
‘And Marco is doing a lot of things himself,’ the president added. ‘And some of the [other] secretaries are.’
Musk, who attended the Cabinet meeting with Trump, told reporters that there is no specific number of jobs that he is looking to cut.
‘We wish to keep everyone who is doing a job that is essential and doing that job well,’ the Tesla and SpaceX boss said. ‘But if the job is not essential or they’re not doing the job well, they obviously should not be on the public payroll.’