By James Oliphant
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Elon Musk, the billionaire adviser tasked with radically downsizing the U.S. government, will attend President Donald Trump’s first cabinet meeting on Wednesday as turmoil continues to swirl around his plans to fire federal workers.
The meeting comes amid a tug-of-war between Musk and Trump, and officials in the U.S. government in what has become an early test of Musk’s authority.
Musk is not a cabinet officer, but no one in the president’s circle has wielded more influence in Trump’s early weeks.
Musk’s email directive that all federal workers detail their accomplishments or face losing their jobs plunged the government into chaos after some agencies told their employees to comply with his demand and others said they could ignore it.
Even after the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, the agency that oversees the federal bureaucracy, told workers they need not respond to Musk’s email, Trump and his allies seemed to suggest workers may be better off if they complied with Musk’s wishes.
Musk on Saturday said federal workers must list five things they did during the week or risk termination and gave them a 48-hour deadline to respond via email.
On Tuesday, Musk continued to press on social media for workers to respond. He was seemingly aided in that effort by Trump, who told reporters on Tuesday that the email request was “somewhat voluntary, but it’s also if you don’t answer, I guess you get fired.”
When asked on Tuesday whether Musk’s threat would be carried out, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump would defer to cabinet secretaries’ guidance for their individual workforces.
Some cabinet officers such as Kelly Loeffler, the head of the Small Business Administration, backed Musk’s demand.
“We just want to know: Are there people there doing their jobs? And again, the bar is so low it’s laughable,” Loeffler told Fox News in an interview on Tuesday.
But others, including Trump loyalists such as Kash Patel, the new FBI chief, told their employees to hold off on replying.
DOUBTING DOGE
As the back-and-forth played out, 21 workers resigned from Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency in protest on Tuesday.
“We will not use our skills as technologists to compromise core government systems, jeopardize Americans’ sensitive data, or dismantle critical public services,” the employees wrote in a resignation posted online.
Musk’s downsizing initiative has laid off more than 20,000 workers, with another 75,000 accepting buyouts, and the effort continued to accelerate on Tuesday. There are about 2.3 million civilian federal employees.
The vast majority of fired workers were in their jobs for less than a year, making them easier to lay off under civil service rules. But there were signs that DOGE was turning its attention to long-term career staff.
Internal Revenue Service executives have been told to brace for another round of job cuts beyond the nearly 12,000 employees already slated to be terminated, two people familiar with the matter said, referring to the roughly 7,000 probationary employees set to be fired and 5,000 employees taking a buyout. The cuts so far amount to more than 10% of the service’s workforce.
The Interior Department on Tuesday received a directive from OPM saying that bureaus such as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Indian Affairs should prepare plans for reductions in their workforce ranging from 10% to 40%, an Interior source told Reuters.
Musk spent much of Tuesday railing against federal judges who have stepped in to block his team from accessing sensitive systems and data at the Treasury Department, Education Department and the Office of Personnel Management and to order the administration to release frozen foreign-aid funds.
“The only way to restore rule of the people in America is to impeach judges,” Musk wrote on X. “No one is above the law, including judges.”
(Reporting by James Oliphant. Editing by Noeleen Walderm and Lincoln Feast.)
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