ON FEBRUARY 22nd Elon Musk posted 158 times on X, his social-media platform. But that was not his only communication. That afternoon, a Saturday, all civilian federal employees—some 2.3m people—were sent an email from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) telling them to reply by midnight on February 24th with “approx” five bullet points listing “what you accomplished last week”, leaving out any classified information. Mr Musk reckons some government employees are doing so little work that “they are not checking their email at all”. He suggested that some government workers are not even real people. In his X posts, he warned that any employee who did not reply would be considered to have resigned.
As the deadline approached, resistance surfaced in major departments, including from Trump loyalists like Kash Patel, the FBI director. At his bureau, in the Department of Defence and at the State Department, bosses told workers not to respond. At the Treasury, an email from John York, an adviser to the secretary, instructed all workers to reply. On deadline day, OPM issued a new memo capitulating to frustrated cabinet secretaries and agency heads. They could allow employees to ignore Musk’s email “at their discretion”. John Thune, the Republican Senate majority leader, suggested the cabinet could take over DOGE’s work. “They’re now in position to make those decisions,” he said.
The power struggle is the latest way in which Mr Musk’s war on waste and fraud in government risks coming off the rails. Two days before sending his email, he appeared at the Conservative Political Action Conference with Javier Milei, the president of Argentina, who gave him a modified chainsaw. The Department of Government Efficiency, or “DOGE”, is named after a different meme, that of a Shiba Inu dog overlaid with cutesy phrases. The tone is jokey, yet DOGE’s disruptions are real. And, like the guardless chainsaw Mr Musk wielded, it risks kicking back on its operator.
Meme boys
So far, Mr Musk’s saw has not cut much into the federal government. A “deferred resignation” scheme offered to employees has been taken up by 75,000 workers, or about 3% of the total. More consequential has been the mass firing of an unclear number of the 200,000 workers on probational contracts. The results have already been messy. At the National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees America’s atomic-weapons stockpile, the government had to scramble to unfire some 300 workers it had apparently dispatched mistakenly the day before.
Trimming headcount is unlikely to save much money. Civilian payroll costs account for just 4% of the $7trn the federal government spends each year, the bulk of which goes on retirement benefits, health care and the like. Contracts add more. But DOGE appears to be doing little to cut these dramatically, either. Earlier in the week, DOGE posted a “wall of receipts” on its website that it claimed revealed $55bn in cancelled contracts. In fact, what was posted came to a tiny fraction of that. Later the website was updated to say the list was just “a subset” of contracts cancelled. It now claimed about $65bn in savings, without documenting that figure.
Dozens of the priciest contracts listed were in fact ongoing purchase agreements, and so the cost figures that were claimed were hypothetical maximums. That the government has an option to buy billions of something doesn’t mean it already has. Second, many of the contracts have been cancelled “for convenience”. This is a clause that gives the government the freedom to cancel halfway through, says Jessica Tillipman, an expert in procurement law at George Washington University. But it doesn’t come cheap. The government still has “to pay for the work that’s already been performed, plus a whole bunch of other costs”, she says.
What is being cut also appears to include things that the government obviously needs. For example, lawyers at the Securities and Exchange Commission are agog that their subscription to Westlaw, a legal research database, has been cancelled. Westlaw is a service almost all commercial lawyers depend on. Much of what else is on the chopping board appears to be research, rather than DEI initiatives or fraud.
If it is not meaningfully shrinking the deficit, what is DOGE actually up to? Part of it seems to be putting into effect the aspiration of Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, who said last year that he wanted bureaucrats to be “traumatically affected”. Civil servants opposed to President Donald Trump, he and Mr Musk may hope, will eventually leave, allowing more pliable loyalists to be put in place.
Yet the cuts may already be seeding a backlash. Republican congressmen as far afield as Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and Roswell, Georgia, have been booed and shouted down by constituents who point out that nobody voted for Mr Musk. The billionaire retains Mr Trump’s backing, however; on February 26th the president invited him to address his first cabinet meeting. “He’s getting a lot of praise,” Mr Trump noted, “but he’s also getting hit.” Mr Musk wore a black T-shirt and black MAGA hat to the august cabinet room. He said his work was needed to prevent America from going bankrupt. When a reporter asked about tensions between him and the cabinet, Mr Trump jumped in to support DOGE and asked if anyone in the cabinet was “unhappy with Elon? If you are, we’ll throw them out of here”. Nobody spoke up.■
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