FILE PHOTO: Elon Musk speaks next to U.S. President Donald Trump (not pictured) in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., February 11, 2025.
Please call your members of Congress today and tell them Elon Musk must be fired. Immediately. (The U.S. Capitol switchboard is 202-224-3121. Tell the operator where you’re from and the operator will connect you to your representatives and senators.)
This past weekend, Musk, the richest person in the world, posted a message to millions of federal employees on X — the platform he bought for $44 billion and turned into a cesspool of lies, hate, and bigotry. His message, from his own account, was:
“Consistent with President @realDonaldTrump’s instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week. Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”
Shortly afterward, all federal employees — including some judges, court staff, and federal prison officials — received a three-line email with this instruction:
“Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager.”
The deadline to reply was listed as today at 11:59 p.m.
Musk is drunk with power. His messages are illegal. He had no authority to send them and has no authority to fire or threaten to fire anyone.
A Department of Justice official, granted anonymity to avoid retribution, noted that the email was labeled as coming from an “external,” server, adding they “cannot legally respond to this” because they handle classified material.
Federal court officials instructed federal court employees not to respond to the email. “This email did not originate from the Judiciary or the Administrative Office and we suggest that no action be taken,” officials wrote.
Officials at the Departments of Defense, State, Health and Human Services, and Homeland Security; the FBI; and the office coordinating America’s intelligence agencies also told their employees not to respond.
Musk is out of his gourd.
On Friday, at CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, Musk celebrated his role in cutting the federal workforce by waving a giant chainsaw in the air, calling it “the chainsaw for bureaucracy.”
His bonkers performance reminded me of “Chainsaw” Al Dunlap, the CEO of Sunbeam in the late 1990s, who used his “chainsaw” moniker to brag that he was cutting half of Sunbeam’s workforce. A few years later, Dunlap was convicted of accounting fraud and Sunbeam went bankrupt.
Like Chainsaw Al Dunlap, Musk’s claims for DOGE savings are wildly exaggerated.
Last week he claimed that DOGE saved some $16 billion in government contracts. Almost half came from a single $8 billion contract with ICE — but it was actually for $8 million, not $8 billion.
Musk and Trump say tens of millions of “dead people” may be receiving fraudulent Social Security payments. The table Musk shared on social media showed about 20 million people in the Social Security Administration’s database over the age of 100 and with no known death. But as the agency’s inspector general found in 2023, “almost none” of them were receiving payments; most had died before the advent of electronic records.
Last week, members of Congress were confronted by raucous town halls where citizens complained about Musk and his chaotic and illegal tactics.
At City Hall in Roswell, a suburb of Atlanta, attendees jeered and talked over Republican Rep. Rich McCormick as they peppered him with angry questions about the DOGE cuts — and the seemingly indiscriminate way some are being carried out.
One man asked McCormick how Musk’s DOGE could fire employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration, which safeguards America’s nuclear weapons, and other federal employees who had been working to combat the bird flu outbreak. More than 1,000 workers also have been laid off from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a major employer in Atlanta.
“Why is the supposedly conservative party taking such a radical and extremist and sloppy approach to this?” the man said as the room erupted in applause, according to videos posted on X.
In West Bend, Wisconsin, GOP Rep. Scott Fitzgerald faced a crowd of angry questioners, including one who asked, “Are you willing to use your subpoena power to tell Musk to stand in front of Congress and answer some hard questions?”
The same question came up in Glenpool, Oklahoma, where Rep. Kevin Hern, a member of GOP leadership, was told that he wasn’t doing his job standing up to the executive branch. “We’re seeing the administration undermining Congress,” a mother with a baby in her lap told Hern, according to News9 in Oklahoma City. “Will you call Elon Musk in to testify under oath to explain what he’s doing?” asked another attendee.
Surveys by Quinnipiac University and Pew Research Center show a growing majority of Americans with an unfavorable view of Musk.
In Pew’s findings, 54 percent dislike Musk (and 36 percent report a very unfavorable view of him), compared to 42 percent with a positive view. Quinnipiac’s results show 55 percent believe Musk has too big a role in the government.
In a new Reuters/Ipsos survey, 71 percent agree that the very wealthy have too much influence on the Trump White House, and 58 percent worry that Musk’s cuts could delay payments for Social Security and student aid.
It hasn’t helped Musk that his cuts have been haphazard and chaotic — doing away with so many essential oversight functions that the administration has had to urgently ask workers to return.
After hundreds of nuclear weapons workers were abruptly fired, the administration is scrambling to rehire them.
After hundreds of scientists at the Food and Drug Administration were fired, they’re being asked to return.
Not incidentally, some of those scientists had been reviewing Musk’s Neuralink startup. The FDA had initially rejected Neuralink’s request to start clinical trials, citing safety risks, but has since given the startup approval.
Anyone smell a conflict of interest?
Musk has enough conflicts of interest across the government to make even disgraced president Warren G. Harding blush.
He has fired workers at the FAA, which oversees his SpaceX.
He has all but stopped work at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which oversees Tesla’s financing arm and a potential payment platform on X.
His firings have affected at least 11 federal agencies (so far) that had 32 continuing investigations, pending complaints, or enforcement actions into his companies, according to a New York Times review.
These investigations include inquiries into safety violations by SpaceX and an SEC lawsuit accusing Musk of securities fraud.
The National Labor Relations Board, an independent watchdog for workers’ rights, had 24 investigations into Musk’s companies. All have been stalled following Musk’s and Trump’s firing of key agency officials.
Musk’s SpaceX alone has $22 billion in government contracts (the total amount is unknown since a number of contracts are secret).
If you believe Musk will go after those contracts, you might also believe that Musk’s advice to Trump that the United States should find ways to work with China has nothing to do with China being Tesla’s second-largest market.
As if all this weren’t enough, Musk is functioning with no accountability or oversight.
Congress never confirmed his nomination to anything. No congressional committee is reviewing what he’s doing. His DOGE bros have not been vetted. He has not produced any information on his personal finances.
In fact, no one outside a tiny circle in the White House knows what Musk is up to or how — except when he posts messages to federal employees on his personal account on X, threatening to fire them.
Finally, here’s the biggest conflict of interest of them all: Musk’s cuts — including his coming attack on Medicaid — are a prelude to Trump’s giant tax cut mainly for the wealthy, including the richest person in the world. Unless the rest of government is dramatically scaled back, that planned tax cut would explode the federal budget deficit.
Let me remind you that our government is supposed to be of, by, and for the people. Musk is supposed to be working for you and me and every other American.
He’s not. He should be fired.
Again, the Capitol switchboard number is 202-224-3121.
Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/
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