The barrage of demands from Donald Trump advisor Elon Musk and his contingent of staffers at his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has pushed newly established department heads within the federal government to distraction and they are now at their wit's end according to a new report.
According to a new report from the Washington Post, yet another directive from Musk for federal employees to file a weekly report on what tasks they performed the previous week is getting pushback at the managerial level with department heads going so far as to tell their staff to ignore it.
After backtracking on his first demand for a five-point list of job achievements or risk termination, Musk was back at it again this weekend and he's getting much more public resistance this time.
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According to the Post's Evan Halper, Dan Lamothe and Hannah Natanson, "... the hastily executed initiative is sowing confusion and resistance throughout the workforce, with many agency heads openly defying it."
Noting "resistance came from officials at the very highest levels," the Post is reporting, "Employees at the department said their Trump-appointed leadership appears to be growing exhausted by the haphazard DOGE directives, as the confusion they are creating diverts workers’ attention and agency resources away from the task of implementing the president’s far-reaching orders to gut climate programs, cut clean energy subsidies and enable more fossil fuel production. The employees said the emails, arriving late Friday night and over the weekend, appear designed to rattle and demoralize workers."
According to staffer, "It does give off ‘psychological warfare’ vibes to send these when they know folks would be heading to bed, or cooking dinner, on weekends in particular."
The report notes that, after the threat of mass terminations created chaos last time, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) is taking a softer approach this time with instructions now stating "consequences for failure to provide the requested information will vary.”
You can read more here.