{"id":22670,"date":"2025-02-25T23:14:12","date_gmt":"2025-02-25T23:14:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usdailys.com\/?p=22670"},"modified":"2025-02-25T23:14:12","modified_gmt":"2025-02-25T23:14:12","slug":"donald-trump-backs-elon-musk-email-threatening-to-fire-government-employees-if-they-dont-respond","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usdailys.com\/?p=22670","title":{"rendered":"Donald Trump backs Elon Musk email threatening to fire government employees if they don\u2019t respond"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The furore over Elon Musk’s productivity email debacle rumbles on as Donald Trump now appears to have given his backing to dismiss any federal worker who doesn’t respond.<\/p>\n

In case you missed it, here’s a recap: Over the weekend, presidential ‘first buddy’ and head of the DOGE department\u00a0Elon Musk<\/a>\u00a0emailed US federal employees requesting a bullet point list of five things they accomplished in the last week.<\/p>\n

“Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager,” the email read, adding that employees shouldn’t send any classified information and reply by Monday (24 February) 11:59pm EST.<\/p>\n

Otherwise, they may find their jobs meeting the business end of\u00a0Musk’s new bureaucracy chainsaw<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Elon Musk has made no secret of his DOGE ambitions (Andrew Harnik\/Getty Images)<\/cite><\/div>\n

Understandably, the federal employees of the\u00a0US<\/a>\u00a0were a little confused by the late night email and whether or not they would be required to reply, given the fact that Musk isn’t officially a government employee and his hiring\/firing powers therefore unclear.<\/p>\n

The situation was further complicated when several department heads, such as the directors of the FBI and National Intelligence, informed their employees to ignore the HR request.<\/p>\n

Now you may be wondering where does the\u00a0US President<\/a>\u00a0stand on all of this? And does Musk actually have the backing to threaten to fire people?<\/p>\n

Well it would seem the 78-year-old leader is fully onboard with the idea, telling reporters that anyone who doesn’t answer will be fired, or ‘semi-fired’ – whatever that means.<\/p>\n

“What he\u2019s doing is saying, \u2018Are you actually working,”\u00a0Trump<\/a>\u00a0said during a meeting with the French President (via<\/a>\u00a0AP).<\/p>\n

“And then, if you don\u2019t answer, like, you\u2019re sort of semi-fired or you\u2019re fired, because a lot of people aren\u2019t answering because they don\u2019t even exist.”<\/p>\n

The deadline has been and gone for the productivity email, prompting Musk to extend the cut-off and reissue his warning about termination.<\/p>\n

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For some reason, the President of France was even present to hear the update (Jabin Botsford\/The Washington Post via Getty Images)<\/cite><\/div>\n

Taking to\u00a0X<\/a>, the\u00a0Tesla<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0SpaceX<\/a>\u00a0CEO retweeted a string of messages in support of his productivity email and seemed to be rather irked that employees hadn’t followed his request.<\/p>\n

“The email request was utterly trivial, as the standard for passing the test was to type some words and press send,” he\u00a0wrote<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“Yet so many failed even that inane test, urged on in some cases by their managers<\/p>\n

“Have you ever witnessed such INCOMPETENCE and CONTEMPT for how YOUR TAXES are being spent?”<\/p>\n

Musk then added that ‘subject to the discretion of the President’ employees have been given another chance to to reply.<\/p>\n

“Failure to respond a second time will result in termination,” he added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    The furore over Elon Musk’s productivity email debacle rumbles on as Donald Trump now appears to have given his backing to dismiss any federal worker who doesn’t respond. … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22671,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usdailys.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22670","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usdailys.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usdailys.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usdailys.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usdailys.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22670"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/usdailys.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22670\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22672,"href":"https:\/\/usdailys.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22670\/revisions\/22672"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usdailys.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/22671"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usdailys.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usdailys.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usdailys.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}