A strange explanation put out by Donald Trump explains why some federal employees aren’t answering Elon Musk’s email.
The president has now responded to Elon Musk’s contentious communication by issuing a severe warning to federal workers.
‘First Buddy’ Donald Trump sent a frightening email to two million government employees on Saturday, February 22, asking them to list five chores they had done in the previous week, failing which they would lose their jobs.
The email was sent by Musk, the chairman of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) task group, with a deadline of 11.59 p.m. on Monday, February 24. Musk stated that the government would construe those who did not reply by that time as having resigned.
Over the weekend, the demand threw federal teams into a frenzy, with many department heads, including FBI director Kash Patel, warning personnel not to respond.
“It was the’silliest thing’ in my 40-year career,” another Pentagon officer claimed.
In a follow-up email, the tech billionaire reiterated his desire to find out “who had a pulse and two working neurones” and who among the employees actually checked their inboxes.
Additionally, the 53-year-old scolded the staff for their “incompetence” in failing to reply to the “utterly trivial” request by Monday night’s deadline and issued a new ultimatum.
“The email request was completely trivial, as the standard for passing the test was to type some words and press send!” Musk remarked on Twitter. Despite encouragement from their bosses, a great number of them failed even that pointless test.
“Have you ever witnessed such INCOMPETENCE and CONTEMPT for how YOUR TAXES are,” he said.
The President seemed to agree with the SpaceX founder’s concept as well, stating that the email on Monday had “a lot of genius.”
Musk later stated in a post that the deadline had been extended “subject to the president’s discretion.”
He responded, “[T]hey will be given another chance,” and reiterated that emails that fail or ignore them “will result in [their] termination.”
Now, President Trump has addressed the matter in a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron.
“We are sending letters to people asking them to tell us what they did last week in an effort to determine whether or not they are working,” Trump stated.
“If people don’t reply, it’s quite likely that they aren’t working or that they don’t exist at all. A lot of people are not responding because they aren’t even real, so if you don’t respond, you’re either fired or kind of semi.
The president’s support comes as Musk’s DOGE is trying to slash costs, which includes firing employees to make the bureaucracy smaller.
It also occurs after Trump told the Tesla CEO to “be more aggressive.”
NBC reports that DOGE intends to use the information gleaned from the email responses to feed an artificial intelligence system to verify that the work being done by staff is “mission-critical.”
