Donald Trump has an odd opinion about why certain federal employees aren’t answering emails from Elon Musk.
In response to Elon Musk’s contentious communication, the president has now issued a strong warning to federal workers.
Donald Trump’s ‘First Buddy’ threatened two million federal employees on Saturday, February 22, with an email stating that they must list five chores they had accomplished in the past week or risk losing their jobs.
In the email, Musk, the leader of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) task group, stated that individuals who did not reply by the deadline of 11.59 p.m. on Monday, February 24, will be considered by the government as having resigned.
Several department heads, including FBI director Kash Patel, advised personnel not to respond to the demand, which threw federal teams into a frenzy over the weekend.
The’silliest thing’ in their 40-year career, according to another Pentagon official.
The software tycoon, however, reaffirmed his email, stating that he wanted to find out “who had a pulse and two working neurones” and who in the staff actually checked their inboxes.
The 53-year-old also offered staff members a new ultimatum and blasted their “incompetence” for failing to reply to the “utterly trivial” request by the deadline on Monday night.
Musk posted on Twitter: “The email request was completely pointless because all you had to do to pass the test was enter a few words and hit send! However, many of them failed even that pointless test, despite encouragement from their supervisors in certain situations.
“Have you ever witnessed such INCOMPETENCE and CONTEMPT for how YOUR TAXES are,” he said.
Additionally, the President seemed to endorse the SpaceX founder’s concept, stating that the email on Monday had “a lot of genius.”
The deadline has been extended “subject to the discretion of the president,” Musk later said in a post.
He responded, “[T]hey will be given another chance,” restating that individuals who disregard or fail to respond to their email “will result in [their] termination.”
In a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron, President Trump has now addressed the issue.
Trump stated: “We’re writing letters to people asking them to tell us what they did last week in an effort to determine whether they are employed.
“It’s quite probable that there isn’t a person or that they aren’t employed if they don’t reply. Since many people are not responding because they are nonexistent, you will either be fired or sort of semi-fired if you don’t respond.”
The president’s support coincides with Musk’s DOGE’s cost-cutting efforts, which include firing employees to shrink the bureaucracy.
Additionally, Trump told the Tesla CEO to “be more aggressive.”
DOGE intends to use the information from the email responses to feed an AI system to verify that the work being done by staff is “mission-critical,” according to NBC.