Over the past month, Donald Trump and Elon Musk have framed their senseless, openly corrupt crackdown on federal employees as a war on faceless, unpopular bureaucrats and the dreaded “deep state.” Meanwhile, the workers they are terrorizing if not firing include health care workers, working-class nurses at Veterans Affairs facilities, and other civil servants performing crucial roles across the federal government.
The latest broadside came this past weekend, when the Tesla billionaire and head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) announced that federal workers needed to submit a list of five things they had “accomplished last week” — or else Musk will fire them.
When the directive was blasted out to various federal agencies and departments in an email, it caused immediate, widespread confusion and panic. Numerous sources and government officials tell Rolling Stone that, at first nobody knew who was exempt from the threatening email survey. The message does not appear legally binding, although it is unclear if Musk and DOGE knew that when they sent it.
The salvo from the richest man on the planet seems to underscore just how little he and his allies understand the basics of how the federal government works. For instance, one source whose department received the Musk email says that many federal workers often don’t check their official email inboxes unless they are specifically told to do so. These employees also do not typically have government-issued computers so many can only access these emails at the agency or department facilities.
Musk had this mass-email sent on a weekend, rendering the Monday at 11:59 p.m. deadline unrealistic for large portions of the federal workforce.
“This jackass doesn’t get how anything works!” says a health care worker who’s employed at a Department of Veterans Affairs medical center and received Musk’s email.
Rolling Stone spoke to three VA health care workers based in different parts of the United States who each independently expressed exhaustion and outrage at Trump and Musk’s reign of horror and institutionalized petulance ever since the twice-impeached president returned to power a month ago. The email over the weekend was seen as just the latest wholly unnecessary kick in their teeth, delivered by the most powerful people in the world onto the faces of some of the country’s most dedicated civil servants.
“I am pissed off like I’ve never been,” says another one of the VA workers, who describes themselves as a now-formerly “Republican-leaning” independent.
On Monday, a coalition of federal workers filed a lawsuit against the OPM in an attempt to block retaliation against employees who did not submit a report to Musk’s team.
“No OPM rule, regulation, policy, or program has ever, in United States history, purported to require all federal workers to submit reports to OPM,” the complaint argues. “OPM lacks the constitutional, statutory, or regulatory authority to order federal agencies to terminate employees in this fashion that Congress has authorized those agencies to hire and manage, and certainly has no authority to require agencies to perpetrate a massive fraud on the federal workforce by lying about federal workers’ ‘performance,’ to detriment of those workers, their families, and all those in the public and private sectors who rely upon those workers for important services.”
By the time the lawsuit was filed several Trump administration officials — some of whom are usually effusively sympathetic to the effort to purge the government of their real and imagined enemies — had issued directives telling their staff to effectively ignore Musk’s latest power grab. A variety of these emails, reviewed by Rolling Stone, went out to staff at the FBI, State Department, Department of Defense, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and elsewhere.Several agencies have cited national security concerns and the sensitivity of the work done by their employees as justifications for ignoring the order.
“No employee is obligated to report their activities outside of their Department chain of command,” wrote Ambassador Tibor P. Nagy, Performing the Duties of the Under Secretary for Management, in an email to State Department staff.
Kash Patel, the FBI’s newly confirmed director, wrote to staff at the bureau that “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,” and instructed employees to “pause” any planned responses to Musk.
The degree to which Trump and Musk’s crusade is beginning to radicalize certain segments of critical voters remains to be seen. However, the federal government is one of the largest employers in the U.S., and much of what DOGE is doing is negatively affecting the types of working- and middle-class employees and contractors Trump and Musk say they care about. There have been some recent signs that constituent backlash is growing.
There is an increasing level of frustration toward (at least some of) Musk’s power-tripping within the upper echelons of the Trump administration, as well. Though administration officials are typically unwilling to put their names out there as believing Musk has overstepped his unelected, legally dubious authority, there are a number of senior officials who believe Musk is far too big for his egomaniacal britches, and wish Trump would stop protecting him so much, two of these officials say. One of them says they were recently reviewing polling conducted about current voter attitudes towards Musk and DOGE, in the hopes of potentially building an internal case that Trump should cut the Tesla and SpaceX honcho down to size. Still, no Trump administration source Rolling Stone spoke to over the weekend predicted this will happen any time soon.
Trump on Monday praised Musk for the email. “He wanted to know what you did this week,” Trump said. “I thought it was great.”
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