Elon Musk announced from Your profile in X that Doge would send an email to all federal officials to whom they had to respond without a period of less than 48 hours. Otherwise, they could occur like automatically fired. Those responsible for these agencies have already been adopted a decision in this regard: to ignore that email.
Musk mail and its strategy. According to published Fortunein the issue of mail, aimed at the more than 2.3 million federal employees, you could read: “What did you do last week?” Inside, Doge urged officials to indicate what they had been working on during the last week. If they did not receive an answer, Doge would assume that this official was no longer active, which would imply his automatic resignation.
It is not the first time that Elon Musk and Doge uses a intimidating email as a channel to fire employees. In 2022, when the millionaire took control of Twitter also sent emails to employees urging them to resign If they did not agree with the new policies that established upon arrival. On that occasion, the result was the dismissal From the Twitter template, although the play did not always go well.
NASA is not in a hurry. At least two government agencies have openly challenged Doge’s indications regarding the dismissal mail. NASA was the first to respond: in an internal statement to which It has had access Bloombergthe managers of the space agency urged their 17,000 employees not to respond to that email until they had a guide on how to respond to ensure that “all the rules are met.”
Those responsible for the agency warned of “pausar any response to the email in question, so as not to reveal confidential or prior information to decision making to unknown recipients”, since doing so could incur a leak of reserved information. They also exempted responding to Doge’s requirement to all permission employees or who were on vacation, because it is not among their obligations to review the mail these days.
The FBI and the pentagon on the spam tray. The managers in charge of supervising the officials of the Pentagon and the FBI have not been very supportive to immediately respond to Doge’s mail.
According to confirmed Associated Press, Kash Patel, the newly appointed director of the FBI said that “the FBI, through the director’s office, is in charge of all our review processes, and will carry out reviews in accordance with the FBI procedures. When when And if more information is required, we will coordinate the answers.
For their part, from the State Department, Defense and National Security, they were much more direct ordering all their employees to ignore Doge mail, ensuring that the State Department would respond for its workers.
“No employee is obliged to inform about his activities outside the department’s command chain,” wrote Tibor Nagy, interim State Undersecretary to the officials in charge. The reasons are very similar to those argued from NASA: there is a high risk of revelation of secrets in those answers.
8.5 million by mail. According to estimates of Fortunethe “drag fishing” maneuver that Doge has used when sending that email will involve an approximate loss of 166,500 hours of work time of the officials, taking as reference the five minutes that Elon Musk assured that would take it to answer it.
All those hours employed in justifying the work of officials represent a disbursement of 8.5 million dollars for state coffers, taking into account that the average salary of public officials in the US is 106,000 dollars a year.
Image | Dvids (Justin Pacheco)