President Donald Trump warned his Cabinet that Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency staffers cannot fire workers without their permission.
Trump gathered his department heads Thursday afternoon and told them that they can be “very precise” with the billionaire and his team “as to who will remain and who will go” as DOGE continues to gut the federal government.
The SpaceX CEO, who is participating in DOGE as a “special government employee,” was also at the meeting as the newly-formed department faces resistance from the courts and from Democrat and Republican lawmakers.
“We just had a meeting with most of the Secretaries, Elon, and others, and it was a very positive one,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “It’s very important that we cut levels down to where they should be, but it’s also important to keep the best and most productive people.”
Trump said that he has instructed his Cabinet to work with DOGE on cost-cutting measures and staffing, but added the caveat: “As the Secretaries learn about, and understand, the people working for the various Departments, they can be very precise as to who will remain, and who will go.”
“We say the ‘scalpel’ rather than the ‘hatchet.’ The combination of them, Elon, DOGE, and other great people will be able to do things at a historic level,” the president added.
The meeting follows backlash from some department leads who instructed their staff to ignore emails mandated by Musk via the Office of Personnel Management, demanding they respond with five things they accomplished at work during the week or face termination.
Musk’s ultimatum caused chaos. The CIA, the State Department, the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services responded by telling staff to ignore the emails.
“The email request was utterly trivial, as the standard for passing the test was to type some words and press send!” the DOGE boss fumed last month. “Yet so many failed even that inane test, urged on in some cases by their managers.”
He spurred on his followers by asking: “Have you ever witnessed such INCOMPETENCE and CONTEMPT for how YOUR TAXES are being spent?”
The latest to be hit by the federal job cuts is the Department of Veterans Affairs, which will lose over 80,000 jobs from the sprawling agency that provides health care for retired military members.
The VA’s chief of staff, Christopher Syrek, told top-level officials at the agency that it had an objective to cut enough employees to return to 2019 staffing levels of just under 400,000. That would require terminating tens of thousands of employees after the VA expanded during the Biden administration, as well as to cover veterans impacted by burn pits under the 2022 PACT Act.
