ON FEBRUARY 22nd Elon Musk posted 158 times on X, his social-media platform. But that was not his only communication. Over the course of that afternoon, a Saturday, all civilian federal employees—some 2.3m people—were sent an email from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) telling them to reply by midnight on February 24th with “approx” five bullet points listing “what you accomplished last week”, leaving out any classified information. Mr Musk reckons some government employees are doing so little work that “they are not checking their email at all”. Some government workers, in fact, he suggested are not even real people. According to his X posts, any employee who does not reply will be considered to have resigned.

Oddly enough, this was not mentioned in the email itself. That indicates the threat of enforcing resignations has no legal force. Nor does Mr Musk have any legal power to fire people. Yet he is sending out these emails, and even agency heads appointed by the president seem to have no idea what they should do about it. At the FBI, in the Department of Defence and at the State Department, workers have been told by their bosses not to reply at all. At other agencies, such as the Department of Justice, some employees have been told they should prepare to reply. At the Treasury, an email from John York, an adviser to the secretary, instructed all workers to reply.

The missive is just the latest way in which Mr Musk’s war on waste and fraud in government risks descending into farce. Two days before, he appeared at the Conservative Political Action Conference with Javier Milei, the president of Argentina, who gave him a modified chainsaw. Wearing dark sunglasses he waved it around, and then declared he had “become meme”. His Department of Government Efficiency, or “DOGE”, is named after a different meme, that of a Shiba Inu dog overlaid with cutesy phrases. The tone is relentlessly jokey, yet DOGE’s disruptions are real. And, like the chainsaw Mr Musk wielded (which had been stripped of its chain guard, a safety feature) it risks kicking back on its user.

So far, Mr Musk’s saw has not cut much into the federal government. A “deferred resignation” scheme offered to employees has been taken up by 75,000 workers, or about 3% of the total. When Mr Musk pulled the same stunt at Twitter, nearly a third took up the offer. More consequential has been the mass firing of an unclear number of the 200,000 workers on probational contracts (these include new workers but also those who have switched jobs recently). The results have already been turbulent. At the National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees America’s atomic-weapons stockpile, the government had to scramble to unfire some 300 workers it had apparently dispatched mistakenly the day before.

Trimming headcount is unlikely to save much money. Even if it were bloated by the sorts of ghost workers Mr Musk imagines (his fear of paying phantom employees predates his arrival in government), civilian payroll costs account for just 4% of the $7tr the federal government spends each year, the bulk of which goes on retirement benefits, health care and the like. Contracts add more. But DOGE appears to be doing little to cut these dramatically, either. Earlier in the week, DOGE posted a “wall of receipts” to their website that they claimed revealed $55bn in cancelled contracts. In fact, what was posted came to a tiny fraction of that. One contract was listed as being worth $8bn, when in fact it was $8m. Later the website was updated to say the list was just “a subset” of contracts cancelled. But the $55bn claim was not changed and has yet to be documented publicly.

Even among the real contracts listed, many of the claimed savings seem limited. For example, dozens of the priciest contracts listed were in fact ongoing purchase agreements, and so the cost figures that were claimed were hypothetical maximums. That the government has an option to buy billions of something doesn’t mean it already has. Second, many of the contracts have been cancelled “for convenience”. This is a clause the government tends to get that ordinary buyers don’t—the freedom to cancel halfway through, says Jessica Tillipman, an expert in procurement law at George Washington University. But it doesn’t come cheap. The government still has “to pay for the work that’s already been performed, plus a whole bunch of other costs”, she says.

What is being cut also appears to include things that the government obviously needs. For example, lawyers at the Securities and Exchange Commission are agog that their subscription to Westlaw, a legal research database, has been cancelled. Westlaw is a service almost all commercial lawyers depend on. If the subscription actually expires, SEC lawyers might be forced to look up case law in physical books. So much for government efficiency. Much of what else is on the chopping board appears to be research, rather than DEI initiatives or fraud.

If it is not saving money, what is DOGE actually up to then? Part of it seems to be putting into effect the aspiration of Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, who told a conference last year that he wanted bureaucrats to be “traumatically affected”. Civil servants opposed to President Donald Trump, he and Mr Musk may hope, will eventually leave, allowing more pliable loyalists to be put in place. The chaos also provides cover for other work DOGE employees seem to be doing: that is, taking control of government IT systems and centralising control of sensitive data, for unclear ends.

Yet the cuts, even though they are small in financial terms, may already be seeding a political backlash. Republican congressmen as far afield as Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and Roswell, Georgia, have been booed and shouted down by constituents who point out that nobody voted for Mr Musk. Polling suggests disapproval of Mr Trump is rising, though his ratings are still in positive territory. And those in MAGA world accuse deep-state workers of “malicious compliance”—that is, deliberately stopping work that is popular, so as to make Mr Trump unpopular. The truth may be more banal. Not all of the president’s political appointees are enthusiastic about DOGE getting rid of their underlings. Some of the resistance to Mr Musk is now coming from Mr Trump’s own nominees.■

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