On Saturday morning, for reasons unknown, Donald Trump published an all-caps missive to his social media platform about Elon Musk. The president’s top campaign donor, the Republican wrote, is “doing a great job, but I would like to see him get more aggressive.”
He did not elaborate as to what “more aggressive” tactics might entail, but just hours after Trump’s message reached the public, Musk did, in fact, take his efforts in a new direction. NBC News reported:
Billionaire Elon Musk issued an ultimatum to federal employees Saturday, saying in a post on his social media platform X that employees must respond to an email justifying the work they completed this week or resign. … “Consistent with President [Trump’s] instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week. Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation,” Musk wrote.
On Saturday afternoon, federal employees soon after received an email from the White House Office of Personnel Management, asking workers to summarize their accomplishments from last week — complete with five bullet points.
The directive was ridiculous enough at face value — it was far from clear who would read and assess these emails — but making matters worse was the number of federal agencies that directed their employees to ignore the email. The New York Times reported:
Several Trump-appointed agency leaders urged federal workers not to comply with Elon Musk’s order to summarize their accomplishments for the past week or be removed from their positions, even as Mr. Musk doubled down on his demand over the weekend. Their instructions in effect countermanded the order of Mr. Musk across much of the government, challenging the broad authority President Trump has given the world’s richest man to make drastic changes to the federal bureaucracy.
The FBI, for example, told its employees not to respond to the email, as did the Departments of Defense, State, Energy, Health and Human Services, and Homeland Security.
The Times’ report added that the Musk-driven email even reached federal judges — which was odd in large part because jurists don’t work for the executive branch — prompting the administrative office for the federal courts to advise judges and staff not to reply.
For an administration and a DOGE endeavor that has been hampered by one shambolic fiasco after another, the developments were no doubt discouraging.
But hanging overhead was a related question: What about the White House’s court filing last week on Musk and his quasi-governmental “department”?
In fact, it was just seven days ago when a White House lawyer argued, in writing, that Musk is little more than a “senior adviser to the president” — a role in which the GOP megadonor has “no actual or formal authority.” What’s more, according to that same court filing, Musk isn’t leading the Department of Government Efficiency at all. The claims were at odds with effectively everything the president and his team have said about the DOGE initiative, but apparently indifferent to the contradictions, Joshua Fisher, the director of the White House’s Office of Administration, delivered the message to a federal judge anyway. Two days later, Trump boasted at a public event that he put Musk “in charge” of DOGE, which was largely the opposite of the assertions in the White House’s court filing. Three days after that, the president urged his ostensibly powerless adviser to “get more aggressive,” at which point a Musk-driven email reached millions of federal employees, threatening their careers. So, which is it? Was the White House’s court filing true, or not? Because at this point, Team Trump’s contradictions are starting to overlap.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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