Elon Musk may have gotten ahead of his skis when he sent a blanket email to federal employees warning they had to detail their work or risk being fired.
The self-styled hatchet man of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — who, it turns out, doesn’t actually lead the department, at least according to the White House — finally seems to be causing some irritation even for Republicans.
Even Kash Patel, Donald Trump’s hand-selected FBI director, told employees at the bureau to ignore Musk’s threatening email. The Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Energy all told employees not to pay attention to the email.
Elon Musk sat in on a cabinet meeting with President Donald Trump on Wednesday as Republicans try to wrestle with the president’s adviser. (Getty Images)
Republican Maine Senator Susan Collins, the chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, seemed to take heart in Cabinet officials asserting their authority.
“The Cabinet secretaries should run their own departments,” she told The Independent.
GOP Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska also expressed frustration.
“I don’t know that I’ve ever asked for five bullet points” demanded in the DOGE email to workers, she told The Independent. “You have this office of government efficiency that’s trying to figure things out,” she added. The “challenge that you have is, for many of these people that are getting these [emails], they have no idea.”
Murkowski gave the example of the Denali Commission, which handles infrastructure in Alaska.
“If you’ve got five good bullet points from somebody in the Denali Commission about what you did, how would you know whether it was good, bad or indifferent?” she wondered.
Of course some lawmakers are big fans of Musk’s tactics, such as Senator Rick Scott of Florida, a member of the DOGE caucus and a major supporter of Trump. He said he hoped to bring Musk to the Hill “to give people an opportunity to ask questions.”
Others, like Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has said outright, echoing Musk’s sentiment: “Federal employees do not deserve their jobs“ — which will likely be played on loop by someone should Greene decide to run for Senate in a state with plenty of federal workers.
Senator Josh Hawley, another MAGA Republican, from Missouri, for his part tried to point out that Musk’s job and contract cuts are not as steep as they seem.
“I mean no farm programs, no Head Start programs, certainly, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, none of those things are being affected anyway,” he insisted The Independent.
Democrats are taking another path: mockery. Some, like then-vice presidential nominee Tim Walz, made fun of Musk during the 2024 campaign for “skipping like a dips***“ at a Trump campaign event.
Senator Tina Smith, a Democrat from Minnesota, slammed Elon Musk’s email to all federal employees. (REUTERS)
Walz’s fellow Minnesotan, Sen. Tina Smith, also hit a nerve when she called Musk a “d*** boss.” Smith is in a secure spot since she will not seek re-election, so she has the ability — now — to say whatever she wants.
“Everybody asked me whether I would have done that under another set of circumstances, and I think I would have,” she told The Independent. “Why do they [federal employees] have to justify their existence to him? It just pissed me off. You could tell by the response I got that it struck a nerve.”
Representative Robert Garcia of California also compared Musk to a phallus.
“Trump is a d*** also,” he told The Independent. “I think that people recognize that Elon Musk is an unelected richest man on the planet who’s cutting their Medicaid, cutting their Social Security, cutting their health care, causing problems at the FAA. And so people are very concerned about it.”
Representative Melanie Stansbury of New Mexico is the top Democrat on the DOGE subcommittee, which had a hearing on Wednesday, and has regularly assailed Republicans for not wanting to hear from Musk.
“People are feeling the cuts, they’re terrified,” she told The Independent. “But we don’t have to make the case. The American people know.”
Musk has embraced his role and the conservative faithful have welcomed his cuts. During his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) last week, he paraded around the stage with a chainsaw given by Argentinian President Javier Milei.
New York Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told The Independent that it was important to highlight Musk’s being corrupt, such as his presence in the presidential cabinet meeting on Wednesday.
“The only reason he has power is because he has purchased it, not because he has been elected, not because he has any legitimacy in terms of that,” she told The Independent. “He bought his way into these Cabinet meetings, and it’s just corruption, on its face.”
The backdrop of all this is that Democrats plan to go on the warpath to attack Republicans’ plans to pass a budget resolution to extend the tax cuts Trump passed in 2017 and potentially slash Medicaid.
They aim to elevate the tension by singling out Musk, not Trump, to infuriate the MAGA base and erode the power of the Trump administration.
