After a fusillade of executive orders in a bid to quickly implement their agenda, the best plans of President Donald Trump and his government-slashing adviser, Elon Musk, have for the moment gone somewhat awry, derailed by a combination of intra-agency confusion and federal court intervention.
I'm James Oliphant, national political correspondent for Reuters, and I promise this email won't ask you to list five things you've done lately or justify your job. All you have to do is read it.
Musk's latest gambit to shrink the size of the federal footprint was an email last weekend that demanded all federal employees they performed over the preceding week or risk being axed.
The sudden demand had an ad hoc, back-of-the-napkin feel to it and spawned confusion and turmoil across the federal bureaucracy with some agencies telling workers to comply and others, perhaps mindful of security issues, said to keep things in-house. By Tuesday, the government's human-resources office had to issue a directive telling employees they could ignore it.
That did not deter Musk, or for that matter, Trump, both of whom insisted at Trump's first cabinet meeting on Wednesday that employees ultimately will have to respond to Musk's requests to keep their jobs. Trump suggested that there are scores of government workers who "don't exist."
Whether Musk's demand is legal remains to be seen, but courts increasingly are slowing the billionaire's roll.
Federal judges have temporarily blocked Musk and his DOGE team from access to payment systems at the U.S. Treasury and sensitive data at the Department of Education. A judge ordered the administration to distribute foreign aid it had frozen. Another blocked the administration's freeze on loans and grants.
Judges want to know what exactly Musk's role at DOGE is. Meanwhile, Musk took to his social media site X to complain about "activist" judges and suggested the ones who get in his way should be impeached.
The job cuts have taken on a haphazard quality. In some cases, the government has scrambled to re-hire workers who perform critical functions like nuclear weapons oversight and bird flu response.
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