Trump Tells Musk: ‘Get More Aggressive.’ Then Came the Emails.

• President Trump stated on Saturday he’d wish to see Elon Musk “get more aggressive.”
• Musk is the face of DOGE, which has upended Washington with its funds cuts and layoffs.
• Musk responded to Trump’s remark a number of hours later.

As far as President Donald Trump is worried, Elon Musk’s DOGE is not chopping sufficient.

On Saturday, Trump praised Musk’s efforts to streamline authorities operations and scale back the scale of the federal paperwork after which referred to as on his ally to do much more.

“Elon is doing a great job, but I would like to see him get more aggressive,” Trump wrote in all caps on his social media platform, TruthSocial.

A couple of hours later, Musk responded on his social media platform, X.

“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.”

The emails started arriving within the inboxes of federal employees on Saturday, with the Trump administration as soon as once more upending conventional norms throughout the federal authorities.

It’s a method that mirrors Musk’s actions as he took over Twitter — now often called X — in 2022.

After buying the social media firm, Musk requested engineers to print out their most up-to-date software program code for evaluation to evaluate their abilities.

During a speech on the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday, Trump referred to as Musk a “patriot” for his authorities work.

In simply over a month in workplace, Trump and the White House DOGE office have pushed by means of buyout affords and laid off swaths of staffers on the US Agency for International Development, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and elsewhere.

DOGE on Thursday stated it had already saved taxpayers $55 billion, principally by means of canceled contracts, although it has made some errors in its accounting, like reporting a contract was price billions when it was really price tens of millions.

Musk says his final aim is to cut at least $1 trillion — or a “best-case outcome” of $2 trillion — from the federal funds.

“Shark Tank” star Kevin O’Leary, a vocal supporter of Trump’s financial insurance policies, additionally stated throughout a CNN interview on Thursday that Musk should go even further in his efforts.

“I don’t think he’s cutting enough,” O’Leary stated. “When you find a broken company, whatever you think you should cut, you add 20 percent more to it. Then you see how the organization adjusts, and you can always hire back.”

“There’s always going to be an opportunity to criticize some cut that was too deep or the wrong person got cut,” he continued. “But my point is, as long as you keep the mandate in place, keep cutting, keep hacking, keep slashing. This is good for government.”

Musk’s move-fast and break-things effort to disrupt and reinvent the federal authorities is having a significant real-world impact throughout the nation.

In addition to the hundreds who’ve left their jobs and at the moment are unemployed, many farmers and organizations that depend on federal funding are looking for clarification on whether or not invoices for accomplished work will probably be paid.

Legal challenges to Trump’s slew of government actions have added to the uncertainty federal employees now face.