WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump promised to make the federal government more efficient — to do more with less. He even deputized billionaire Elon Musk to be the face of a new Department of Government Efficiency.
But critics say Musk’s chainsaw approach to slashing government programs, contracts and workers is having the opposite effect, sowing such confusion that it has hamstrung the bureaucracy’s ability to serve the public and even carry out key parts of Trump’s own agenda.
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“It’s leading to paralysis, and nothing is getting done,” said one Veterans Affairs official who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal. The official described “absolute chaos” at the agency, with even Trump political appointees afraid to misstep and incur a backlash from either the White House or the public.
“The best employees are starting to look elsewhere,” the official added. “I can’t overemphasize that enough.”
Trump and other White House officials say that the president is thrilled with Musk’s work and wants him to be more aggressive. But there are signs of pushback within the political ranks of the administration, as Cabinet secretaries risk the loss of the civil servants best equipped to carry out critical government functions, and rank-and-file civil servants say exercises in navel-gazing have become a distraction from important work.
In short, running the government can be harder than it looks.
Over the weekend, Musk threatened to fire any federal worker who did not respond to an email from the Office of Personnel Management demanding that they list five things they did at work the previous week. Trump said people who did not reply would be fired or “semi-fired,” even though it is not clear that Musk or anyone else has the legal authority to summarily dismiss as many as 2 million federal workers at once for failing to reply to an email.
Some agencies and top officials urged employees to answer Musk; others — including Kash Patel, Trump’s newly confirmed director of the FBI — told them not to. Then, Musk posted on his social media platform X that the first round wouldn’t count.
“Subject to the discretion of the President, they will be given another chance,” he wrote Monday night. “Failure to respond a second time will result in termination.”
Finally, a few hours before the midnight deadline, the Office of Personnel Management told federal workers they would not be fired if they did not respond — long after many of them had already done so.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted Monday that there was no daylight between Trump, Musk and the Cabinet. But she indicated that employees should follow the instructions of their department heads.
“The president has entrusted his Cabinet secretaries to oversee their workforce,” Leavitt said during a briefing at the White House. “That’s why he nominated them to be Cabinet secretaries.” She did not say whether employees who fail to respond to future requests from Musk would be fired.
Several veteran federal workers who spoke to NBC News on the condition of anonymity said that managers and employers at agencies spent hours on Monday determining how to deal with Musk’s demand — beyond just the time it took to assemble bulleted lists.
“Probably spent at least 30-60 minutes sharing thoughts about how to approach it with other federal employee friends from different agencies,” said one of the workers who asked that her agency not be named. “Probably spent 60 minutes thinking about how it might be interpreted and also looked at the banned words to make sure I did not include those.”
The employee was referring to words — such as “diversity” — that the administration is averse to. “I spent at least 30 minutes drafting [and] shared it with my manager via email before sending it,” she said.
Leavitt, who surely did not have to worry about being fired regardless of her response, described a much easier process for herself. She estimated that she considered and wrote out a list of five items in 90 seconds. Leavitt also said that more than 1 million employees responded.
Just in terms of man-hours, the cost of the exercise was likely in the tens of millions of dollars.
Resistance to Musk has been building, both in public polling showing his approval rating under water and within the federal government. On Tuesday, an unsigned letter purportedly from nearly two dozen officials at the United States Digital Service, the agency that DOGE replaced, said they had resigned. The letter was addressed to White House chief of staff Susie Wiles. NBC News confirmed the authenticity of the letter but has not confirmed the identities of the 21 staffers.
A former USDS worker said Musk is disabling the government rather than improving it.
“DOGE seems to think ‘efficiency’ just means doing less, no matter how good the return is,” the ex-employee added. “That scorched earth approach is driving away the people who actually have the skills to fix the government’s problems.”
Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, R-N.Y., lightly criticized the meat-cleaver cuts to government in an interview on MSNBC Monday.
“I think they need to be more targeted and they need to be more thoughtful,” she said. “President Trump has appointed some really wonderful people to lead his agencies. And these secretaries of the various departments should be looking at the agency, seeing where efficiencies can be made, seeing where there’s too much overhead.”
Some of the Trump administration’s moves have been delayed temporarily as courts try to determine whether the president has the power to take certain actions without input from Congress.
Trump loyalists, including Musk, have noted that President Bill Clinton cut hundreds of thousands of federal jobs. But Elaine Kamarck, who led the Clinton administration’s reorganization of government, noted in an interview that it took “seven years, not seven weeks” and required Congress to act.
“They are crippling the government. They are using an axe not a scalpel to attack the government,” she said. “This is a really weird period of time that this guy has chosen to do this with this team of kids and they go into an agency and they decide on cuts without any reference to where the cuts are and what these people are doing. It’s kind of nuts. We did not operate this way.”
Already, the administration has had to scramble to try to reverse firings of workers who deal with bird flu, nuclear safety and other areas that affect the well-being of the public. Trump’s top permanent lieutenants have an interest in making sure that they aren’t accidentally taking away tools they need to implement the president’s agenda, whereas Musk is a temporary “special government employee.”
Kamarck said it made sense that Patel and some Cabinet officials issued guidance that their workers did not have to reply to Musk.
“You need more FBI agents, not fewer, in order to fight the war on crime,” she said.
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