Kash Patel, who was confirmed by the Senate as FBI director this week, has told staff to ignore a request to federal workers issued by Elon Musk, marking the first sign of potential friction between the Silicon Valley financier and a Trump appointee. Musk is engaged in an effort to radically downsize the federal government through a newly formed agency called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), having already fired tens of thousands of employees across the federal workforce and issued legally dubious “buyout” offers.
On Saturday, Musk had announced on X (a social media platform that he owns) that all federal workers would be receiving an email “requesting to understand what they got done last week,” and that “failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.” The email that workers eventually received from the Office of Personnel Management – which DOGE took control of shortly after Trump’s inauguration – requested “5 bullet points” from employees regarding what they had accomplished in the previous week, and stated that they had until 11:59p.m. on Monday to respond.
Shortly after that message went out, Patel sent his own communiqué to the FBI’s 38,000 employees, telling them to ignore the order from OPM. “The FBI, through the Office of the Director, is in charge of all of our review processes and will conduct reviews in accordance with FBI procedures,” the message reads, which was first reported by NBC. “When and if, further information is required, we will coordinate the responses. For now, please pause any responses.”
Neither Musk nor Patel have spoken publicly about the conflicting directives as of this writing, although the Musk has reposted and replied to posts about his own on X. “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!” He posted on Sunday morning. “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.”
Many of Musk’s claims of fraud in the federal government since the start of Trump’s second term have already been found to be erroneous or overstated. Earlier this week, Musk claimed on X to have found “tens of millions of people marked in Social Security as “ALIVE” when they are definitely dead,” calling it a “HUGE problem.” This was not the case, however, as Musk was misreading entries in the Social Security Administration’s data which was written in programming language that defaulted incomplete entries in its records to a reference date from 150 years ago. An Inspector General analysis of the Social Security Administration from last year found that less than 1% of $8.6 trillion in payments made over seven years were found to be suspect, and the vast majority of those were likely overpayments to living people.
DOGE has faced similar issues due to its indiscriminate cuts, having axed federal employees carrying out immediately critical functions – like researching bird flu and safeguarding the country’s nuclear weapons – only to about-face and hire them back.
