As Donald Trump prepares for his return to the White House on January 20th, in part on the promise to reduce wasteful government spending, one of his campaign’s most prominent backers has begun harassing government workers online. Silicon Valley financier Elon Musk has taken to his own social network, X (formerly Twitter), to call out federal employees by name whom he accuses of working “fake jobs,” setting the tone for how he will perform in his upcoming position as an efficiency czar of sorts for the next president.
Last week, Musk reposted a tweet from an account called “Datahazard” (which bills itself as an “unincorporated think tank”), who posted a screenshot showing a federal employee’s title and full name. Along with the screenshot, the post read: “I don’t think the US taxpayers should pay for the employment of a ’Director of Climate Diversification (she/her)’ at the US International Development Finance Corporation.”
Although Datahazard includes gender pronouns in quoted text for their post, “she/her” does not appear in the screenshot alongside the job title. The addition indicates the possibility that Datahazard is confusing the meaning of “diversification,” taking it to have something to do with DEI policies rather than diversification of energy sources, which is what it actually means in this context. In his repost, Elon Musk commented: “so many fake jobs.” According to the Wall Street Journal, the position is in fact a highly technical role that deals with protecting our country’s agriculture and infrastructure from the effects of climate change, and is being carried out by someone with relevant degrees from MIT and Oxford.
In another post, Musk singled out a loan officer from the Department of Energy responsible for a climate change program that in 2010 awarded Elon’s then-fledgling electric car company, Tesla, $465 million. That amounts to over a third of Tesla’s $1.35 billion market cap at the end of that year.
All of the roles that Musk has singled out in the past week are held by women.
Musk is set to run a new organization dubbed the Department of Government Efficiency, (the acronym, “DOGE,” is a meme that Musk has repeatedly posted in the past). There is nothing government-sanctioned about the organization despite the official-sounding name, which would have to be approved through an act of Congress. However, Musk and the organization’s co-director, former Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy, are coordinating with representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) to convert the organization’s recommendations into proposals she could bring up in a new subcommittee.
