State Department, Pentagon, FBI employees barred from reporting to Musk despite threats of dismissal

Key US federal agencies, including the FBI, the State Department and the Pentagon, have rebelled and issued orders toоthem employees do not respond to Elon Musk's letters. In these letters, he demands that civil servants evaluate their own effectiveness, he writes Air force. In turn, the dismissal of civil servants in knowledge-intensive industries could lead to the loss of leadership in the international arena, warns edition Axios.

Photo: Cpenler | Dreamstime.com

In the new Trump administration, Musk has become the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Musk sees his task as reducing budget expenditures, bloated bureaucracies, and fighting corruption.

On February 22, Musk's Office of Personnel Management (OPM) sent an email to millions of employees in government departments and agencies asking them to send Musk a summary of their work over the past week by midnight on February 24.

Failure to do so or failure to comply with the appointed deadline shall be considered as voluntary resignation.

“This threat is illegal and reckless, and is yet another example of the arbitrary and chaotic behavior that Musk has inflicted on government agencies meant to serve the people and dedicated public servants,” said Virginia Democratic Congressman Gerry Connolly in response to Musk’s demands.

On the subject: Several lawsuits have already been filed against the Trump administration, mostly involving Elon Musk

Who stood up to Musk?

In a February 23 post on his X platform, Musk wrote that he had already received numerous reports. Many federal employees, in his opinion, deserve promotions for their performance.

However, a number of key US agencies refused to participate in Musk's experiments.

Newly confirmed FBI Director Cash Patel sent his staff a letter on the evening of February 22 asking them not to respond to OPM's request.

He recalled that, according to the procedure adopted in the department, any inspections of the FBI’s work must be carried out through the directorate’s office and in no other way.

The State Department leadership gave a similar response, stating that only it is authorized to evaluate the work of the department.

“No employee is required to report on their activities outside the chain of command within the department,” senior State Department official Tibor Nagy said in an email.

The Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency have also instructed their employees not to respond to Musk.

"When and if needed, the Department of Defense will coordinate responses to the email you received from OPM," Pentagon officials said in a memo to their staff.

At the same time, one senior Pentagon official (name not given) said that Musk’s request is “the stupidest idea in the last 40 years.”

In response to this comment, Elon Musk wrote on Platform X that anyone who "shares the Pentagon employee's attitude should look for another job."

Those who submitted and those who abstained

The U.S. Justice Department advised its employees to "be prepared to follow the instructions as requested" in the OPM letter, but not to include any classified information in their reports.

"If you have any questions about the content of your response, please contact your supervisor," the agency's leadership advised in an email to employees on the evening of February 22.

Among the agencies that have decided to comply with Musk's order are the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Department of Transportation, the Secret Service (USSS), and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency.

The National Security Agency, the Internal Revenue Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have refrained from taking any action for now and have asked their employees to await further instructions.

The American Federation of Government Employees, the largest US labor union, has criticized Elon Musk's actions, calling his pressure on government workers "cruel and disrespectful" and threatening to sue.

It is emphasized that the letter from OPM, and in fact from Musk, was sent out on Saturday, when, by some estimates, approximately three million government employees did not have access to work emails and could not have met the established deadlines even if they had wanted to.

"More compassion, Elon"

Musk's move against federal agencies comes after Donald Trump praised his work on budget savings last week and wanted him to be even more aggressive.

Since the start of the new American administration, notices of complete closures, major layoffs, or indefinite furloughs have been sent to the Department of Education, the Small Business Administration (SBA), the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the General Services Administration (GSA), the United States Postal Service (USPS), and others.

The White House's most significant move in the field of "budget austerity" was the demand to shut down the activities of the American humanitarian agency USAID, which is responsible for funding American foreign aid and development programs and managing them.

And although USAID is an independent agency with its own budget, Trump demanded that it be closed “for corruption” without providing any evidence of the agency’s corruption.

According to the plans of the presidential administration, out of 10 thousand USAID employees, just over 600 will remain working.

In total, tens of thousands of people have already been laid off as part of the activities launched by Elon Musk and his DOGE department.

"I just want to say one thing to Elon Musk: Please add a little compassion to what you're doing. These are real people and their lives are real. And these are real mortgages," Utah Republican Sen. John Curtis told CBS.

A blow to science and technology

Staff cuts, layoffs and uncertainty at several federal agencies are raising concerns about the loss of critical scientific and technical expertise.

Today, no single country dominates all scientific fields. The United States is in fierce competition with China for leadership in science and technology, as innovation has greater economic value and geopolitical tensions rise.
"This is not just about federal employees," said a former National Science Foundation official. "It will reduce our ability to maintain leadership on the international stage."

The layoffs hit specialists in rocket science, ecology, climate science, artificial intelligence, chemistry and other scientific disciplines. The remaining scientists are forced to cope with a greater volume of work with fewer resources, while many anxiously anticipate further layoffs.

Agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are seeing a wave of early retirements, as well as cuts that have already occurred or are expected.

"People leave with years of experience," said one current NOAA scientist.
"NASA has a very high turnover rate right now," said one space agency employee. "They're losing people with a lot of experience."

On February 8, the National Science Foundation cut 168 jobs, or about 10 percent of its workforce.

Half of them were probationary workers, many with doctorates. The other half were highly qualified contract workers working for universities and other organizations.

NOAA is preparing to cut probationary employees and is already losing people to early retirement offers.

The agency is responsible not only for climate and meteorological research, but also for the management of satellites, national fisheries and the protection of marine species.

NASA has so far avoided mass layoffs of probationary employees, but a wave of high-profile departures is creating uncertainty around the Artemis program to return to the moon.

"Everyone is waiting for the thunder to strike, or what they're going to hear next week. Or never. It's terrible," the NASA employee concluded, adding that the situation has already caused many to leave.
About 5% of NASA employees have accepted the administration's offer to voluntarily leave. The space agency said layoffs of probationary employees would be based on their performance.

Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference on February 22, President Trump announced his efforts to shrink government.

"We have removed the radical left bureaucrats from the buildings and locked the doors behind them," he said. "We have gotten rid of thousands."
In an earlier post on Truth Social, he praised Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency: "ELON IS DOING A GREAT JOB, BUT I WISH HE WOULD BE EVEN MORE AGGRESSIVE."

Probationary employees typically have been in their positions for less than one to two years. However, this does not mean that they do not have longer government experience. The probationary period may begin again after a promotion, transfer between agencies, or change to a new position.

“The immediate loss is that we’ve taken away all the people we brought in to fill critical gaps in ecological modeling, advanced survey statistics, cloud technology, and AI,” the NOAA scientist explained.

NSF's primary role is to evaluate applications from scientists and engineers for taxpayer-funded research. The foundation's annual budget is about $9 billion.

"We need incredibly smart people to determine whether research is feasible and whether it advances science," said the former NSF employee.

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The spillover effect could impact the training of future STEM professionals in the United States.

As a NOAA scientist put it, the layoffs "remove any desire for young professionals to consider government work as a realistic option. It's cutting off an entire stratum of young people without whom no organization can survive. These are people who grew up with AI technology while older generations are not. We need them to move forward."

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