Elon Musk continues his harassment of officials with another ultimatum to fire them

The chaos and confusion created in the Administration by his first ultimatum was not enough. Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, was back on the attack on Monday and threatened to fire officials who do not answer a message in which he asks them, without having the authority to do so, to explain what they have done at work the previous week. The actions of the President of the United States, Donald Trump, and his main ally, Elon Musk, are increasingly showing traits that resemble authoritarianism, by issuing their threats arbitrarily, without submitting to laws or procedures, and demanding whatever they want, even if they have no legal authority to do so.

The administration itself had to clarify on Monday that responding to the inappropriate request from Musk and his team was voluntary and that not doing so was not equivalent to resignation, as he had baselessly threatened, but at the same time Trump insisted that not responding was equivalent to being fired, fueling legal uncertainty. Musk said that he is giving employees a second chance. “At the discretion of the president, they will be given another chance. Failure to respond a second time will result in termination,” the tycoon threatened again , although it is not clear when the new message will be sent.

The controversy began when, over the weekend, the Administration sent an email to the approximately 2.3 million federal employees with the subject line: “What did you do last week?” The body of the email read: “Please respond to this email with approximately five points of what you accomplished last week with a copy to your manager.” The deadline to respond was Monday at 11:59 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (Tuesday at 5:59 a.m. in mainland Spain). The email did not identify the sender or his authorization to request that information.

Before officials received it, Musk had tweeted the contents of the email with a threat of his own, again without legal cover: “As directed by President Donald Trump, all federal employees will shortly receive an email asking them to report what they have done over the past week. Failure to respond will be construed as resignation,” the South African-born billionaire posted on Saturday.

The demand sparked controversy, not only among officials but within federal agencies and departments themselves. Many of them pushed back against Musk's demands and told their employees not to respond to the request. It was the most significant public divergence between the billionaire Trump ally and members of the president's Cabinet. Ultimately, the White House Office of Personnel Management informed agency heads that their employees were not required to respond, but that the response was voluntary, implicitly disavowing Musk.

The president himself defended Musk's initiative on Monday and his team also subscribed to his conspiracy theory that there are a large number of public officials who collect their pay without even existing, a theory that Musk has also embraced without presenting any evidence or clue in this regard.

“We’re trying to find out if people are working,” Trump said in the Oval Office, flanked by French President Emmanuel Macron. Trump justified Musk’s demand as an effort to identify those people. “And then if they don’t respond, they’re kind of semi-fired, or fired, because a lot of people aren’t responding because they don’t even exist,” he said, suggesting that many people on the federal payroll are under false identities.

Musk already floated the conspiracy theory over the weekend. “We believe that non-existent people or the identities of deceased people are being used to collect paychecks. In other words, this is an outright fraud,” he said, without providing any clues as to why.

Asked about instructions from some departments and agencies to their employees not to respond to Musk’s request, Trump downplayed the disagreements. “They don’t mean it in any combative way with Elon,” he said, adding that “everyone thought it was a pretty cool idea.” According to Trump, what some departments were doing was trying to preserve their confidential information, although the confrontation appears to go deeper than that.

"Incompetence"

Lawyers representing unions, businesses, veterans and other organizations filed a lawsuit in federal court in California on Monday, arguing that Musk had violated the law by threatening mass layoffs. The suit, led by the State Democracy Defenders Fund, called it “one of the most massive labor frauds in the history of this country.”

Musk, however, continues to insist on his thesis and to be dismissive of federal officials and employees. “The email request was completely trivial, as the standard to pass the test was to type a few words and hit send! Yet many failed even that inane test, urged in some cases by their bosses. Have you ever witnessed such incompetence in how your tax dollars are spent? Makes good old Twitter look good. I didn’t think that was possible,” he tweeted, misrepresenting what happened. “This is just asking federal workers to do what everyone else does. Fair enough,” he also wrote, as if any employee of any company should respond to such a request even if it came from someone not qualified to make it.

The United States is in a fiscal crisis and will likely need spending cuts and tax increases (tariffs or otherwise) to stabilize its debt trajectory. But Trump and his team have entered the administration like a bull in a china shop, with the added bonus that they don't seem to care about respecting the law. This is causing chaos and confusion within the administration, where federal employees are receiving contradictory instructions. Some have been fired and then rehired because of the hole they left behind. Overall, the treatment that officials are receiving makes federal employment less attractive for the future.

The email about what employees did last week opens a new front, but the layoffs continue regardless of that email. In addition, since Monday, many federal agencies have already required their employees to work in person. “Starting this week, those who have not yet returned to their posts will be placed on administrative leave,” Musk wrote. “Full-time remote work in the era of Covid is over,” tweeted Lee Zeldin, Trump’s new administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).