The intimidation campaign is deliberate
Musk continues to bully federal workers.
Elon Musk has declared war on the bureaucracy. And as a Thursday deadline nears for federal employees to take a “buyout,” he is looking to demoralize and wear down his enemy.
Across the government, officials in President Donald Trump’s administration have fired off message after message pushing staff to accept the deferred resignation program, coaxing them with promises of paid vacations and threatening that there will be layoffs if they don’t leave. At the same time, Musk has bullied them with online taunts.
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According to Trump allies, the intimidation campaign is deliberate as the president pursues an unprecedented purge of the federal workforce.
“They realized that you can kind of turn up the heat in a lot of these departments and people will leave, especially because the federal workforce is older,” said a former Trump official who, like others in this story, was granted anonymity to speak freely. “You have a glut of Boomers now and they’re reaching retirement age. And if you can force them out of the door, you don’t have to replace them, and it’s one way to reduce the government.”
Well, yes, and another way would be to lock them in and gas them.
Musk and Trump officials have increasingly turned the screws on career employees as Thursday’s deadline has neared.
Musk boasted to his 216 million followers on his social media platform X that DOGE is “the wood chipper for bureaucracy.” He accused Treasury employees of “breaking the law every hour of every day,” attacked the U.S. Agency for International Development as a “viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America,” and shared a post belittling government workers as dumb.
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Musk’s moves at DOGE mirror his purge at his social media company previously known as Twitter. He said he cut 80 percent of the staff there, and was sued by employees alleging that he did not pay them all of the severance that they were owed. A U.S. judge dismissed one such case, but others are working their way through the courts and arbitration.
And now Musk’s highly publicized history at Twitter is coming back to haunt him. Some federal employees and union leaders representing them said that they are not taking the offer because they don’t trust it will be upheld.
They also have dug in as they’ve felt smeared.
“The offer that we’ve been presented with is not something I see a lot of people taking,” said Sheria Smith, union president of Local 252 at the American Federation of Government Employees. “It was really, really insulting, frankly. It insulted our work ethic and insulted our commitment to our jobs.”
Smith said that of the 2,000 members she represents, fewer than 10 have asked the union questions about the offer. She added that she is “aware of a handful of people who are taking it because they already had plans to leave the agency.”
I like that “fewer than 10.” Artistic.
He has not declared war on the ‘bureaucracy’ – he’s declared war on the government. The bureaucracy is only one part of that. Yeah, say it like that when you are quoting him, but otherwise, report honestly.
Everyone, or nearly everyone at least, hates ‘bureaucracy’. By wording it that way, it sounds like a noble goal. By declaring war on the government, though, Musk has declared war on the country – and all the people who live in it and benefit by rules and organizations of the government. He has declared war on the regulations that keep us safe, the regulations that protect (however imperfectly) our environment, the subsidies that keep prices affordable, the subsidies that keep businesses (including his, I suspect) open, on public education, and on a host of other things people value, but don’t seem to be completely aware of as a function of their lives, or of government, or something.
If the media had been reporting everything the government does for us accurately over the years, Musk might find he had to battle everyone…but when the government does things right (which it does most of the time) you don’t hear about it…that’s not news. Just like we don’t hear reports that tell us that most of us didn’t murder anyone today, we don’t hear reports that most of the agencies of the federal government are working well, doing things we need done, and functioning properly. So most people think it’s a screw up.