Tangle - Musk’s directive to federal workers.

Episode Date: February 25, 2025

On Saturday, Elon Musk posted on X that federal employees must respond to an email from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) detailing their work in the past week, adding that “failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.” Shortly after, OPM emailed federal employees asking for a list of “5 bullets of what you accomplished last week” by Monday at 11:59pm ET (screenshot). However, many agencies have instructed their workers not to reply to the email, while unions representing federal employees filed suit to challenge the order. Ad-free podcasts are here!Many listeners have been asking for an ad-free version of this podcast that they could subscribe to — and we finally launched it. You can go to ReadTangle.com to sign up!You can read today's podcast⁠ ⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠, our “Under the Radar” story ⁠here and today’s “Have a nice day” story ⁠here⁠.Take the survey: What do you think of Elon Musk’s job performance? Let us know!You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Our podcast is written by Isaac Saul and edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Will Kaback, Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Who wants this last parachute? I do. Daily Jackpots. A chance to win with every spin and a guaranteed winner by 11pm every day. Good morning, good afternoon and good evening and welcome to the Tangle Podcast, a place we get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking and a little bit of my take. I'm your host, Isaac Saul. And on today's episode, we're going to be talking about the email that was sent to over 2 million federal workers over the weekend, asking them to explain five

things they've done in the last week, accomplished in the last week, or be fired by Monday at midnight. This is part of the Elon Musk Doge initiative. So we're going to dive in and break it down, share some views from the left and the right, and then my take. As always, if you have thoughts, feel free to write in and let us know at staff at readtangle.com. With that, I'm going to send it over to John to break down today's main story and I'll be back for my take. Thanks Isaac and welcome everybody.

Here are your quick hits for today. First up, the United States, North Korea, Russia and Belarus voted against a UN resolution designating Russia as the aggressor in the Ukraine War. The US later introduced a resolution to the UN Security Council that did not blame Russia for starting the war and called for a resolution to the conflict, which passed with Russia and China's support. Five European countries abstained. Number two, President Donald Trump hosted French President Emmanuel Macron at the White House, where the two discussed efforts to end the war in Ukraine.

Macron said that the United States and France need to work together to determine lasting future security guarantees. Number three, on Monday, a federal judge temporarily banned the Department of Education and Office of Personnel Management from sharing personally identifying information with members of the Department of Government Efficiency. Separately, a federal judge declined the Associated Press' request for a temporary restraining order to prevent the White House from excluding its reporters from press events over its refusal to refer to the recently renamed Gulf of America by its new official name. Former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Gramaswamy formally announced his bid for Governor

of Ohio. Apple said it will commit $500 billion to U.S. manufacturing over the next four years, including opening a new facility in Houston by 2026 to support the company's artificial intelligence system. Federal employees suing Elon Musk over this email. You see it right here behind me sent to millions it happens Saturday Here's what it asks. What did you do last week? The email demands employees list five things that they accomplished the directive Previewed in a post by Elon Musk on X threatens quote failure to respond will be taken as a

Resignation close quote and by the way, there's a deadline, a ticking clock here, midnight tonight. So, here's the fallout. Five agencies encouraging employees not to respond. The Department of Defense, the FBI, and the Department of National Intelligence among them. Those are some heavy-hitter organizations there. On Saturday, Elon Musk posted on X that federal employees must respond to an email from the

Office of Personnel Management detailing their work in the past, adding that failure to respond will be taken as resignation. Shortly after, OPM emailed federal employees asking for a list of five bullet points of what you accomplished last week by Monday at 11.59 p.m. Eastern Time. However, many agencies have instructed their workers to not reply to the email, while unions representing federal employees filed suit to challenge the order.

McLaureen Pinover, a spokeswoman for OPM, said the request was part of the Trump administration's commitment to an efficient and accountable federal workforce. President Donald Trump also praised the initiative, calling it genius, and saying, if people don't respond, it's very possible that there is no such person or they're not working. However, on Monday, the White House appeared to soften its position,

saying that employees should defer to their agency heads for guidance on how to respond to the email. Also on Monday, Elon Musk posted on X that at the discretion of the president, federal workers will be given another chance to respond before facing termination. The Department of Health and Human Services issued competing instructions to employees, with department head Robert F. Kennedy Jr. telling workers to comply with the email after the agency's acting general counsel instructed some not to. Many other agencies and departments, including the Justice Department,

Federal Bureau of Investigation, State Department, the Department of Defense, the National Security Agency, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, told employees not to respond. Others, however, instructed workers to reply to the email, and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy posted his five actions on X. Musk's directive follows a series of efforts

by the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOJ, and the OPM to reduce the size of the federal workforce. Notably, OPM offered full pay and benefits through September to workers who agreed to resign by February 6th. Approximately 65,000 employees accepted the offer. Separately, the Trump administration is attempting to lay off thousands of probationary employees. On Sunday, unions challenging the probationary employee layoffs added a claim to their existing

lawsuit that the email did not follow any existing requirement for these employees to report to OPM. The unions are seeking a court order barring any action against a federal employee who does not comply with the email. Today, we'll share arguments from the left and the right about Musk and OPM's request, and then Isaac's take. We'll be right back after this quick break. I do. Enjoy the number one feeling. Winning in an exciting live dealer studio,

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You know, for texting and stuff. And if you're not getting rewards like extra data and dollars off with your mobile plan, you're not with FIZ. Switch today. Conditions apply. Details at fiz.ca. All right, first up, let's start with what the left is saying. Alright, first up, let's start with what the left is saying. The left argues the move is the latest misguided attempt by Musk to slash the federal workforce. Some highlight the contradiction that Musk is acting while the White House claims he has no authority. Others say firing workers based on their response to the email would be illegal.

In Just Security, Nicholas Bednar wrote about what just happened with the Musk OPM email. The OPM email does not specify how the agency intends to use the information it collects from employees. More broadly, the email raises concerns about the efficacy of the Trump administration's efforts to cut the federal workforce, Bednar said. Five bullet points describing one work week, a week that included a federal holiday, cannot capture the importance of the work performed by most federal employees, and it certainly cannot capture the functions of those federal employees already placed on administrative

leave who were explicitly prohibited from performing their job duties during the week in question. In essence, it appears that the Trump administration is demanding that employees justify their positions, but to date, the administration has done a consistently poor job of determining which positions are in fact important," Benar wrote. Its poor track record is evidenced by agencies' efforts to recall fired probationary employees after realizing they perform crucial functions, such as managing the nuclear stockpile and the power grid or those working on responses to bird flu. Meaningful reorganization of the federal workforce requires more than five bullet points.

It requires a holistic evaluation of how federal programs operate. In The Washington Post, Aaron Blake said Elon Musk's threat to federal employees is the latest episode to call into question the White House's downplaying of his authority. The email, which even some Republicans have criticized as ham-handed or cruel, gave the workers a deadline of Monday night to respond. But what has happened since has been somewhat remarkable. Leaders at several agencies, including Trump's own political appointees, have instructed employees not to respond to the email or to hold off on responding," Blake wrote.

It's perhaps the first big example of would-be allies publicly resisting Musk's influence. Musk's tactics have been rubbing some Trump advisors the wrong way, as The Post reported Friday, but the tensions hadn't really broken out into the open. Beyond that is how it all squares with the White House's claims about Musk's role. Just five days before the fiasco, after all, the White House had claimed Musk had no formal or actual authority.

Then he basically threatened to end the employment of large numbers of federal workers if those employees didn't do what he told them, Blake said. In other words, it's an unclear mess, and it's one the White House and the Trump administration surely aren't done being made to account for, both in courts of law and in the court of public opinion, where Musk is increasingly a problem for them. In Slate, Scott Poludek explored the true purpose of Elon Musk's weekend email ultimatum. It's unclear why Musk's non-response equals resignation threat doesn't also appear in the email, but one might plausibly speculate that an attorney intervened, given the Merit

Systems Protection Board's unequivocal finding that a federal worker's resignation must be affirmative and voluntary as a matter of fundamental fairness and due process," Politic wrote. Federal agencies are already required, per 5 USC Section 4302, to establish appraisal systems to rate employees' performance. The agencies are constrained to use objective standards and criteria appropriate to the particular employee being evaluated. The email from HR at OPM.gov exists entirely outside of this framework, starting with the fact that the OPM isn't an agency. A minor irony to Musk's dead workers collecting paychecks claim is that Musk himself is apparently

a legal ghost, heading, but not really heading, DOJ, a quasi-legal entity that is presently enjoying all the authority of a congressionally created federal agency without any of the reporting and transparency obligations," Pouludik said. For Russell Vaught, the director of the Office of Management and Budget and the architect of Project 2025, the primary motivating factor behind his proposal to make it easier to fire federal workers is clearly malice. For Musk, a relative newcomer to far-right politics, it seems to be more about domination and the lulls. Alright, that is it for what the left is saying, which brings us to what the right is saying.

The right is mixed on the directive, though some say the episode could benefit Doge in the long run by clarifying the limits of Musk's authority. Many defend Musk and say the reaction from federal workers has been overblown. Others suggest the request creates its own inefficiencies. In National Review, Andrew C. McCarthy called it a farcical episode, but said the pushback to Musk could help Doge in court. I'm not sure Doge is much more than a public relations stunt. It is titillating the Trump base by sending all the right Democrats and government employee

unions into a tizzy, McCarthy wrote. Still, a sudden court ruling that Musk is wielding power unconstitutionally would stop the murky operation in its tracks. It probably helps Doge, then, that the officials with unquestioned executive authority are treating Musk as though he's just making suggestions, even if that may irk the president. Obviously, it's not a bad idea for the Trump administration to scrutinize the federal workforce,

but that's why federal agencies have layers of supervision, McCarthy said. I suspect this is mostly theater. By the time you read this, in the dog years that are the new days of the Trump era, the episode will no doubt have been overrun by five or ten new constitutional crises. But by countermanding Musk, Trump officials have probably helped him show that he's mainly a consultant, not a major government officer for appointments clause purposes. In town hall, Jeff Charles said federal workers freak out over Elon Musk's email reaches new

heights. I don't really see a problem with this request, but I can understand those arguing that it's a bit ham-fisted. As Representative John Curtis, the Republican from Utah, said during an interview, if I could say one thing to Elon Musk, it's like, please put a dose of compassion in this, and that it's a false narrative to say that we have to cut and you have to be cruel to do it as well," Charles wrote. Threatening someone's job over an email might not be the most efficient leadership strategy if Musk and his team want to get people on board with his initiative.

Moreover, this should probably be left to the heads of federal agencies to determine how best to ascertain what their workers are accomplishing. It is also worth noting that there is no way Doge will be able to comb over the tens of thousands of emails sent by federal employees. However, the notion that such a move would require a lawsuit also seems silly. Yes, the approach was harsh, but how difficult is it to send a quick email listing five things one accomplished over the past seven days? This is one of several lawsuits folks on the left have filed to stymie the Doge agenda, so it seems likely that this

is motivated more by politics than fairness. In The Atlantic, Colin Friedersdorf wrote about the obvious inefficiency of Elon Musk's new order. On Saturday, Elon Musk, the billionaire charged by President Donald Trump with cutting government waste, alerted the public to massive inefficiency in the federal bureaucracy. Government employees would soon be distracted from their actual work by a request from on high, Friedersdorf said. As someone who hates government waste, I sympathize with any Americans who are cheering this initiative because they believe it will expose workers who accomplish nothing.

But those Americans are cheering, albeit unwittingly, for massive inefficiency. Just the latest example of the chaos Doge has created across the federal government undercutting its own aims. Consider America's roughly 14,000 Federal Aviation Administration air traffic controllers. If each one of them spends just 10 minutes opening their work email, finding this request, drafting a response, proofreading it, and sending it off,

that adds up to 2,333 hours of work. Can you think of a more cartoonish example of government waste than using 292 work days worth of man hours to clarify that, last week, air traffic controllers monitored planes, Friedersdorf wrote. Watching Musk, a man recently focused on electric cars and getting humanity to Mars, direct his inventiveness toward the public sector equivalent of TPS reports is vexing. Improving federal efficiency is a worthy project.

Trump will have no incentive to deliver on it if his base credulously cheers gambits as wasteful and poorly defended as this one. Alright, let's head over to Isaac for his take. All right, that is it for it with the left and the right are saying, which brings us to my take. So most days, I can see the merit in arguments from across the political spectrum. After all the issues we cover are usually divisive and rife with nuance and historical debate and ideological differences. But every once in a while, I'm left surprised by how silly our politics are,

like when an idea as unhelpful and counterproductive as this email becomes at all controversial. Let me start here. No self-respecting person would take an email preceded by an explicit threat of losing their job demanding they list five things they did in the last week as a fair way to be treated. Every single person listening to this podcast would be somewhere between annoyed and enraged and rightfully so. Imagine your reaction to getting this on a Saturday night with a 48-hour deadline to

answer and at the behest of a person you never met, don't work for, and who is gleefully mocking you on social media while issuing it. Of course, nothing illustrates the self-defeating and inefficient nature of this directive more than Trump's own agency heads instructing their employees to ignore the email. Cash Patel, the newly appointed head of the FBI, told employees not to respond to it, saying the FBI, through the office of the director, is in charge of all our review processes and will conduct reviews in accordance with FBI procedures. Which, you know, obviously, it should not be surprising that agency heads are drawing

a line with Musk here. Employee evaluations and firing decisions should not be made by a group of government neophytes scouring 2-3 million emails and then using artificial intelligence to try to understand an agency they've never worked for or stepped foot inside. Musk supporters responded to the indignation from employees by saying that this happens in the private industry and government workers should get fired if they can't play ball. This too is preposterous. I've never heard of a single boss, aside from Elon Musk, giving all their employees

a shot clock to detail five things they'd done in the last week, regardless of whether they are on assignment or leave under the threat of termination. At minimum, they would torch their reputation in whatever industry they worked, and at worst be staring down a lawsuit and the end of their own career. More personally, I'm the founder and CEO of a media business. I would never treat my employees like this, because on top of being an inefficient waste of their time, it's also incredibly disrespectful and cruel. It would make me a crappy boss.

It would make Tangle a crappy organization to work for, and our product would suffer for it. Some pundits on the left have tried to attack must by valorizing federal workers, like Just Securities Nicholas Bednar, under what the left is saying, who argued, five bullet points describing one work week, a week that included a federal holiday, cannot capture the importance of the work performed by most federal employees. This is an unnecessary claim and probably untrue of many federal employees. The point isn't that most federal workers' jobs are so important and complex they can't summarize their week in five bullet points. The point is that it's ridiculous to demand millions of people to respond to an email account they've never heard from before to keep their jobs, while the person behind the plan bangs

on across social media about what horrible, lazy, inefficient people they are. Interestingly, liberals and anti-Trumpers aren't the only ones making these arguments now. Some conservatives have started standing up for the federal workforce. Chuck Ross, a pro-Trump columnist and writer, made the same points I did about how no self-respecting person would respond to this request. Conservative pundit Rick Moran argued neither must nor Trump has the authority to request such a list or make continued employment in the federal government contingent on replying.

And David Marcus, one of the most reliably pro-Trump voices at Fox News, wrote that federal workers aren't billionaires or grifters, adding that the federal government's problem is not allegedly lazy middle-class government employees, it's corrupt wealthy politicians and their donors. Now those are some good arguments. Musk naturally has begun to change his explanation for this exercise. It's no longer about keeping the most important employees or figuring out what the federal employees are actually up to, but now purportedly a plot to discover federal workers who don't exist.

Non-existent people or the identities of dead people are being used to collect paychecks, must posted. In other words, there is outright fraud. Even if this underlying premise were true, why send an email to two million people to figure it out? Why not just run their names and emails through the Doge algorithm we've been hearing so much about and try to contact those people directly? More importantly, I don't think the premise is true. Some examples exist of the government wasting millions of dollars on quote unquote ghost employees like police and military in Afghanistan, but we already have an oversight mechanism that catches that sort of thing.

I suspect Musk's assertion will go down the same way the claim that billions of dollars are being sent to 150-year-old people on social security went, which Trump's own social security administrator recently clarified was wrong, though Trump continues to repeat it. All of this leaves me dumbfounded. Musk is not an idiot. He's not incompetent. Anyone pretending so is deluding themselves. So, what's he up to? My best guess is he is trying to force more people out or look

for an excuse for mass layoffs since fewer employees took the fork in the road buyout than he apparently expected. As I said last week, Musk stands to benefit personally in a dozen different ways from a beleaguered downsized federal workforce, which has always been what Doge is really about. He is too competent to truly believe he's making the government more efficient or more cost-friendly right now. The Wall Street Journal officially estimated

that Doge will save the government roughly $2.6 billion over the next year. With the odds that after all the future settlements, the rehiring of workers, the increased costs of hiring workers who feel these jobs are not secure, and the 8 months of severance we're paying the 75,000 people who took the buyout offer, that this all ends up costing us money? I honestly don't know how long any of this will go on.

Republicans in Congress are privately starting to worry and who can blame them? ABC estimates these layoffs are impacting some 200,000 people. I suspect that means tens of millions of Americans now know someone who has lost their job due to these cuts. Some of them will have their lives ruined. They'll lose homes or get divorced or have to scramble to find health insurance for their sick spouse. I know of one woman who is five months pregnant working in the national parks and had to leave her temporary housing provided by her job to go apartment hunting, now unemployed in a rural area with limited opportunities and sparse housing. She was fired without cause or explanation as part of the Doge cuts.

People are going to be pissed. Social media is replete with Trump voters asking why they or their family members lost their jobs. And those people are going to start demanding more responsibility from Congress. Eventually, Republicans and Democrats will have to do their jobs and control how these agencies are being run, how this money is being spent, and who gets to keep their jobs. We'll be right back after this quick break. 11pm every day. 19 plus and physically located in Ontario. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600. Or visit kinexontario.ca. Select games only. Guarantee void if platform or game outages occur.

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You know, for texting and stuff. And if you're not getting rewards like extra data and dollars off with your mobile plan, you're not with Fizz. Switch today. Conditions apply. Details at fizz.ca. All right. That is it for my take, which brings us to today's reader question. This reader question was actually directed to Ari Weitzman, our managing editor. So I'm going to pass the mic over to him and he's going to respond directly to it.

Thanks, Isaac. Nice to hear your voice again. And I'm sure we're going to have plenty to talk about for our Sunday podcast this weekend. So reader question this week comes from Trent from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, who asked, was what Steve Bannon did at CPAC a Nazi salute or will you explain that one away too? So straight away, yes, it was a Nazi salute. So for context, in January, I wrote that I didn't think what Elon Musk did was an intentional Nazi salute.

For that, I got a lot of pushback for my interpretation, and I don't want to relitigate all that here. But if you're curious to hear more, you can listen to my thought process in more detail on a podcast that I did with Magdalena, our social media and much other things manager last January. So instead, let's talk about Bannon's gesture. That was different from what Musk did,

and I can't reasonably explain that away by any other motive than an intentional salute. He wasn't throwing his heart out to the audience. He wasn't waving to someone. He can't claim to be socially awkward. Bannon yelled, fight, fight, fight. Then he paused, turned, raised his right arm. He then paused again and said, amen. I don't see anything else Bannon could have been doing. I think his seagale was meant to troll people who were bothered by what Elon Musk did, but even if that's the case,

that means Bannon was taunting people who thought Musk gave an intentional Nazi salute by giving an intentional Nazi salute. People can say or do something bad or hurtful accidentally, and I'm pretty tolerant about that, especially if they respond with humility. Musk's response was notably poor, which rightfully eroded a lot of grace he might otherwise have been granted. Bannon made a Nazi salute in a way that didn't seem accidental,

and I don't expect his response to be any better, and so far it hasn't been. Perhaps worst of all is that no Republicans or CPAC attendees publicly condemned the moment. The only pushback has come from a far-right French politician. This mainstreaming of Nazi salutes, even sarcastically, is just an enormous problem for the right right now. It is not a leftist hallucination and still images of Democrats mid-wave don't cancel out this problem. For the health of the GOP, this is a rot that they have to address now. That's all I got to say about that. So I'm going to send it back to John to ease us out of the rest of this podcast.

Good luck with the tone shift, John. Thanks Isaac. Here's your Under the Radar story for today, folks. Home prices in the United States increased on an annual basis for the 19th consecutive month in January, while sales of previously occupied homes fell 4.9% from December. Economists point mortgage rates as a primary driver of the trend, as 30-year mortgage rates have risen to roughly 7% in 2025 after falling to a two-year low last September. Mortgage rates have refused to budge for several months despite multiple

rounds of short-term interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve Lawrence Youn, chief economist at the National Association of Realtors said when combined with the elevated home prices, housing affordability remains a major challenge The Associated Press has this story and there's a link in today's episode description and there's a link in today's episode description. [♪ music playing. All right, next up is our numbers section. The approximate number of federal workers who are in the competitive service,

meaning they cannot be fired, suspended, demoted, or subject to other adverse actions without cause after they pass a probationary period, is 1.5 million, according to Pew Research. The approximate number of federal workers who are in the accepted service, meaning their jobs are exempted from the regular hiring rules,

examples include lawyers, teachers, and chaplains, is 735,000. The approximate number of federal workers who are in a special classification called the senior executive service, as managers of major programs and projects is 8,700. The approximate number of SES employees who can typically be fired or removed from the

SES at the discretion of the head of their agency is 850. The percentage of Americans who think there should be a U.S. government agency focused on efficiency initiatives is 72 percent, according to a February 2025 Harvard Caps poll. The percentage of Americans who think DOJ is helping to make major cuts in government expenditures is 60%. The percentage of U.S. adults who approve and disapprove, respectively, of Elon Musk's job performance in the federal government is 34% and 49%, according to a February 2025 Washington Post Ipsos poll.

And the percentage of Democrats and Republicans, respectively, who approve of Elon Musk's job performance in the federal government is 6% and 70%. And last but not least, our Have a Nice Day story. Finding accessible and affordable dental care can be a struggle for many families, but a community college in Massachusetts is tackling this problem. In a symbiotic clinic, dental students are given the opportunity to provide care to real patients offering free teeth cleaning to children and discounted rates to adults. The February Clinic for Children's Dental Health Week focuses on all things oral care,

teaching patients how nutrition impacts dental health as well as teaching them about dental procedures. CBS News has this story and there's a link in today's episode description. All right everybody that is it for today's episode. As always if you'd like to support our work please go toangle.com, where you can sign up for a newsletter membership, podcast membership, or a bundled subscription that gets you the best discount we offer. We'll be right back here tomorrow

for Isaac and the rest of the crew. This is John Law signing off. Have a great day, y'all. Peace. Our podcast is written by me, Isaac Saul, and edited and engineered by Duke Thomas. Our script is edited by me, Isaac Saul, and edited and engineered by Duke Thomas. Our script is edited by Ari Weitzman, Will Kavak, Gali Saul, and Sean Brady. The logo for our podcast was made by Magdalena Bikova, who is also our social media manager.

The music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. And if you're looking for more from Tangle, please go check out our website at readtangle.com. That's readtangle.com. With the Fizz loyalty program, you get rewarded just for having a mobile plan. You know, for texting and stuff. And if you're not getting rewards like extra data and dollars off with your mobile plan You're not with Fizz switch today conditions apply details at Fizz.ca Sonic the Hedgehog 3 Is now streaming Is much more impressive than the Hedgehog I fought previously.

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