US Department of Transportation (DOT) Secretary Sean Duffy has instructed employees under him, including air traffic controllers, to respond to an email sent by Elon Musk’s DOGE team warning them to justify their employment or face termination. Meanwhile, other agencies are not complying with Musk’s directive.
Air Traffic Controllers Instructed To Justify Their Employment To Elon Musk
Over the weekend, Elon Musk, who President Trump appointed to run the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) without Senate approval, sent out an email to federal employees asking what they did last week:
Explaining the email, Musk said, “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”
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.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 22, 2025
(had that arrived in my inbox, I would have simply marked it as phishing and moved on with my day)
I won’t live in fear. The point of these emails is not to eliminate waste, but to assert power and to show who is boss. I don’t play that game and I won’t kiss the ring. This email is about putting fear in the heart of every federal employee but no one named Elon Musk has the power to determine who is useful and who is not and this juvenile email from a drugged-up Mephistopheles is counterproductive.
Like the majority of Americans, I am quite happy for a forensic accountant to audit agencies with a fine-tooth comb because it does appear there is waste…and any such waste is unacceptable. There’s likely graft and corruption too. Let’s all agree to attack that because our budget deficit and national debt are alarming.
But I view these sorts of intimidation exercises as muscle-flexing by an emperor with no clothes, chasing optics and not the sort of real reform that will make a positive difference. Real reform will take hard work…it will take real people to dig deeply.
And this folks is why I now have such low regard for Duffy, who wastes his time arguing with Hilary Clinton online or posting hollow tweets like a sleazy politician instead of actually getting the job done. No, there is no time for such tomfoolery.
Mr. President, 5 things I did last week:
1. Terminated NYC elitist, anti-worker congestion pricing.
2. Launched an investigation into the $16 billion in taxpayer dollars wasted on a high-speed rail project that, after 17 years, has yet to lay a single mile of track.
3. Saved $10…— Secretary Sean Duffy (@SecDuffy) February 24, 2025
'I HAVE NO PROBLEM': @SecDuffy calls on DOT employees to respond to Elon Musk's email asking what they've recently done. The transportation secretary, who shared his own bullet points, said if workers could not detail five things they did, "maybe you shouldn't be employed here." pic.twitter.com/8Nscln0Wky
— Fox News (@FoxNews) February 24, 2025
Hmm, what did Air Traffic Controllers do during the last week? Kept our airspace safe. They are overworked enough – we don’t need to assign them busy work.
Meanwhile, other department heads have pushed back on Musk’s order. Tulsi Gabbard, who was confirmed as Director of National Intelligence last week, told her staff, “Given the inherently sensitive and classified nature of our work, IC [intelligence community] employees should not respond to the OPM email.”
Kash Patel, who now heads the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and Department of Homeland Security Chief Kristi Noem also told their staff to disregard the email.
But on Monday afternoon, Musk sent out a fresh demand:
Subject to the discretion of the President, they will be given another chance.
Failure to respond a second time will result in termination. https://t.co/04xzgScXfj
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 25, 2025
And Trump backed him, telling reporters at the White House this afternoon, “I thought it was great…There was a lot of genius in sending it. We’re trying to find out if people are working.”
Let the turf wars begin…this is not going to end well.
As laudable as I find the elimination of government waste as a policy goal, the idea that an unelected dark horse and his team of minions using dynamite instead of a broom to sweep away that which is unnecessary is disproportionate and only makes a bad matter worse.
image: @elonmusk / X
Seems legit to question the federal ATC workforce. There are MANY issues with how it is run.
Many countries have it privatized and works just fine.
Tulsi is eliminating some who abused a company “chat-room” , and USAID is eliminating a bunch who incorrectly wasted foreign aid money .
Let those laid-off ones try their hand at the private sector and then do what is expected of them .
Just calm down. A very minimal request, which is mostly a request for proof of life. I worked for a Fortune 100 company for over 30 years, and even had to submit daily progress reports from time to time when working on short term priority projects. I requested my teams do regular status reports as well. About time federal employees join the real world.
So if Joe Blow walked into your office and asked for a progress report I suppose you’d give it to them?
Joe Schmoe is his name .
@jeil … +1 . Yep , and a normal job interview merely requests One recent accomplishment .
My answer was : “I arrived Early for this interview , despite traveling 60 plus 80 miles . That would be a total of 140 miles , no ?” I was offered the job .
You are right. thanks for the correction. 🙂
And yet this exactly what you voted for Matthew.
Wrong.
Must be a new reader.
The article reads “They are overworked enough”. I disagree. You here of residents (doctors on training working more than 24 hours straight) but atc controllers do not. At many airports traffic is low. In NYC, there are multiple people working. It is not a video game where all players eventually lose and crash. Rather, just do the work then take a scheduled break.
ATC should easily be able to answer…..like
*directed air traffic at JFK on 5 shifts
*transferred duties to next ATC controller on next shift for planes en route
*filed reports of work performed
*coordinated with supervisor as indicated
Musk ìs hated, I get it. In oʻur town, there is a cuty employee that wastes time just dreaming up city ordinances that are bad and bureaucratic. Like her proposed that all trees be issued license plates.
Don’t be so harsh. As somone who drives a Tesla and uses Starlink, Musk is a genius…who has no place in his current role in the US government.
Musk is not a genius. He is a functional retard (according to his dad) who was given lots of money and advantages that his parents accrued during apartheid.
Furthermore, many ATC don’t even use their government email accounts because their duties dint require the use of email, so this is creating more work for them just to be able to reply.
It sure would be a shame if his private jet was forced to go into an indefinite holding pattern next time controllers see it in the air
I think sometimes it is the functional retards who are the orthodox innovators…think Turing, Hughes, Jobs, and even Einstein.
But Musk has forfeited the respect I had for him in this bald-faced power grab that is stupid…it’s not what is needed to hold people and agencies accountable.
@Matthew … He is making a “Roll Call” .
There are “ghost employees” , as well as “tele workers” .
I submit this as evidence that musk is a complete moron:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ATC/s/xp1mBna9de
@Matthew … He was appointed to do a job , by the only nationally elected office-holder , the President .
He is calling “Roll-Call” to eliminate the “ghost workers” : non-existent workers on the payroll .
Screw Musk. No one elected him. Bigger issue is the Senate/Congress – not a peep out of them. Guess we could fire them as they are obviously not doing their job, fiscal oversight or otherwise. All scared of Trump….,
Yes, the lapdogs in Congress are derelict in their duty. Even if you accept the unitary executive theory, it does not mean that Congress has no oversight.
So, how do you get the Congress to do their job?
What I do not understand is, why isn’t the usual way, throwing money at Congress people and Senators and their associated lobbyists working?
GOP members in Congress, other than Mitch who is retiring, have an irrational fear of Trump because he is such a vindictive and petty man. I believe they are afraid of being primaried by the sycophants who worship Trump.
@Matthew … you have failed to take into consideration that Trump may be correct , and the congress may agree with him because they like his thinking … after all , a majority of the U.S. voters liked his thinking .
( Not because they are in fear of him . You may be mistaken about that .)
The majority of voters did not vote for Trump, @Alert.
He won the popular vote, but not a majority of it.
@ alert. Everyone is in fear.
And therein lies the problem. They capitulate to Trump because they are afraid of losing their seat. So their own personal interests are more important than that of their constituents. Morals truly have no place in US Congress.
I’m all for eliminating workers who have no right enjoying lavish salaries and benefits for doing next to nothing,appointed on the basis of their pigmentation,genitalia,religious affiliation,etc.However,Musk in my opinion isnot a born in the USA American,his roots are Afrikaner/Canadian,and I don’t care who he is,I wouldn’t like such a person terminating me from my USA government job.Like when Crandall was CEO of American Airlines,not a snowball chance in hell the reverse would ever be true with Air Canada.
Ooops Carty not Crandall
Are you really this ignorant or are you deliberately trying to mislead your readers? Musk regularly campaigned with Trump on making the government more efficient. Most Trump voters voted for him knowing that Musk would have a waste elimination role in the administration.
Here’s a helpful explanation of how the federal government is elected since you seem to have no knowledge of it
https://x.com/RapidResponse47/status/1892651121790832859
How many man hours have been spent for 2 and a half million government employees to answer this dumb email? Nothingbefficientbabout that. They already have performance reviews that determine if they are doing their jobs. Why not start there?
Since musk is the subject, I wanted to share the LALF connection to his baby mama of #13 Ashley St Clair. About a year ago Matthew posted a story about this woman complaining to Delta about suspected migrants on her flight. ( no proof). On investigation, because of her out of control racism, she was condemned by Charlie Kirk the MAGA guru that openly wanted to get rid of Black pilots and feels stoning gays to death is God’s perfect plan. When you’re too racist for kirk you have to be awful. So this St. Clair is what musk has chosen to impregnate. Very poor judgment and his involvement with the management of government is equally short sighted.
Wow.
I didn’t make that connection.
Here’s the story you are referencing:
https://liveandletsfly.com/delta-immigration-boycott/
Women are better at remembering some stuff.
That whole story is fabricated. It may be his kids via IVF, but he never impregnated her naturally. They are working together to put this out because he is embarrassed that everyone knows that his penis no longer functions due to a botched penile implant. As an added bonus, they are making him out to be a deadbeat dad because in his drug addled mind, it is “cool” to treat people that way.
Trust me, she is being compensated for this ruse.
Well that is her goal for a payout, but the recent screen shots of St Clair and her manager Loomis ( think Lewinsky and Tripp) may indicate there was a decided effort to quiet her prior to the election as not to disrupt Trump’s base. However there is a MAGA fracture and I take no joy in this as it involves a child.
In my experience, Afrikaans men have horrible looking penises.
Well I can’t comment on that … But he he he
I’m speaking from personal experience, honey.
Many FAA employees have already been let go. Many are inexperienced paper pushers who just make ATC jobs harder.
Oh dear, Criminal Trump’s sidekick Musk is as deluded as his master once again demonstrating that people who have made money in a single field think it makes then intelligent enough to tackle anything and everything as they have the skills to do it.
They never have and any common sense is replaced with arrogance. After all, WTF does Musk know about the FAA. It’s time they all downed tools and grounded US aviation.
Me thinks thou protest too much. Especially in light of today’s near miss in Chicago. Air Traffic Controllers aren’t sacrosanct and we’re 36 TRILLION dollars in debt, We also have an ATC system that has been outdated for decades that pols of both stripes have been promising to fix for just as long.
Business as usual ain’t cutting it.
Are you suggesting this report changes anything?
Surely musk doesn’t actually care about any sort of efficiency or waste-cutting. He is already the richest man in the world. His only motive is to cut the deficit in order to drop the corporate tax rate. He doesn’t need to save tax money, he has no use for it whatsoever, and his billions would be better spent helping those in need, but alas, that concept doesn’t exist here anymore.
Perhaps he is a patriot and does care about efficiency or waste-cutting .
Patriot to what? They have spent more money than was saved.
Exactly.
Patriot? He’s not even American. He should go back to africa
@Jerry: *Bingo*
“Patriot” to the almighty $$$$ !! … I do hope the Federal employees get to ‘Show & Tell” after they obediently respond to this insulting/meaningless/WASTEFUl email … Meanwhile “Rome is burning”…. What a sad downward spiral this country is in….
So Matthew hates Elon now? His politics have been coming to the fore more and more lately.
I recall not ao long ago the left wing LOVED Elon. They couldn’t say enough nice things about him. Then their Teslas started veering to the right…..
Cairns musk probably was on his meds then
LOL. I really like you Maryland. But doing what I called a “weekly” (or bullet points of what I’d gotten accomplished) was part of almost every job I ever had. My bosses demanded it of me and I demanded it of my employees.
I understand Elon isn’t a boss and doesn’t have any real right to demand this but introducing this kind of culture into the federal workforce is a a good thing IMO. I’ve worked with the feds (and in particular the FAA) and while there were a lot of dedicated employees there were countless slackers. In private industry they would find it a lot harder to hide- and a weekly is a good way to expose them.
Matthew’s umbrage is misplaced. Both in this instance and in his comments on the firing of “hundreds” of FAA employees (a small decimal percentage of the actual workforce).
I think he should save the ire for a real travesty. Like the outmoded ATC system that keeps leading to real deaths and crashes and almost countless near misses.
If your bosses demanded this of you it’s probably because they thought you were a f**k up. When you do your job, you don’t need to be micromanaged like that
@BillyBob … “slackers” are everywhere , most noticeably in government bureaucracies .
I noticed Brandon and Camel-a as two of the most obvious “slackers” . They were Leaning Towers of Pisa made of Flexible Rubber , completely lacking in stature or substance .
@cairns … +1 .
Count this to outmoded things to the insufficient funding on improvements that had already been approved. For twenty years. We owe this to the l people we have elected. Both sides full stop.
LOL x2.
Sadly, Billy Bob clearly never had a real job. But his bosses could count the number of hamburgers he’d fried.
Let’s do a roll call… anyone that ever had to do this, speak up here. My guess is cairns is the only one
@BillyBob … did this many times . For initial interviews ( mostly ) , and also before performance reviews .
I’m not talking about interviews and reviews. This guy is implying he has to justify his existence on a regular basis. Sounds like he’s on a PIP
Oh and FWIW I keep voting for Keith Richards for president. Doesn’t seem to work.
LOL as someone from the rest of the world this is all so entertaining.