Republicans and Democrats alike have flayed billionaire Elon Musk for his ‘work report’ diktat to federal employees, even as several US government agencies instructed their staffers to not comply with the instructions.
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The SpaceX and Tesla CEO heads the Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE, a special department tasked with cost-cutting, in US President Donald Trump's second term, which began on January 20.
‘These are real people’
John Curtis, a Senator from Utah from Trump's Republican Party, called on Musk to be ‘compassionate.’
“If I could say one thing to Elon Musk, it’s like, please put a dose of compassion in this,” Curtis, whose state has 33,000 federal employees, said.
“These are real people. These are real lives. These are mortgages. It's a false narrative to say we have to cut and you have to be cruel to do it as well,” he added.
Also Read: FBI's Kash Patel pushes back against Musk's productivity ‘mail’, asks FBI staffers to ‘pause any response’
Mike Lawler, the Republican representative from New York's 17th congressional district, questioned the legal basis the Trump administration would have for dismissing tens of thousands of workers for refusing to heed Musk’s latest demand.
{{/usCountry}}Mike Lawler, the Republican representative from New York's 17th congressional district, questioned the legal basis the Trump administration would have for dismissing tens of thousands of workers for refusing to heed Musk’s latest demand.
{{/usCountry}}To be sure, the email did not include the threat about workers losing their jobs.
Meanwhile, Senator Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat, was rather blunt, and called out the X owner for his ‘illegal’ actions.
‘Rescind order; apologise’
In a letter, the 800,000-member American Federation of Government Employees urged the Trump administration to ‘rescind’ Musk's order and ‘apologise.’
Describing the world's richest person as ‘unelected and unhinged,’ federation chief Everett Kelly wrote, “We believe that employees have no obligation to respond to this plainly unlawful email absent other lawful direction.”
Musk defends diktat
Amid the outrage, Elon Musk on Sunday called his latest order ‘a very basic pulse check.’
“The reason this matters is that a significant number of people who are supposed to be working for the government are doing so little work that they are not checking their email at all! In some cases, we believe non-existent people or the identities of dead people are being used to collect paychecks. In other words, there is outright fraud,” he claimed on X.
However, the South African-born entrepreneur did not provide any evidence of the ‘fraud.’