And again, as you said, as we’ve said repeatedly raises so many questions about how much inside intel is Elon Musk getting at all of these agencies, and especially one where he has so much business.
Katie Drummond: Absolutely. And of course, important to mention here, as President Trump said a few weeks ago, if Elon does encounter a conflict of interest, he will simply recuse himself. Obviously that was said with a great deal of sarcasm. Remains to be seen what conflicts of interest will present themselves next from within DOGE because I have a feeling these are not the last stories that WIRED will be publishing on this topic. We’re going to take a short break. We’ll be back with Brian Barrett in a minute.
Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. So Brian, let’s talk about the email. Over the weekend, WIRED had a team of reporters furiously working to cover an email that went out from the Office of Personnel Management, so essentially the federal government’s HR apparatus, and that was touted by Elon Musk on X. So ostensibly, this email is coming from the heart and mind of Musk himself, is the impression that we have essentially telling federal workers to send a productivity report back to OPM by Monday at midnight or they would be fired. That’s how things started on Saturday. They unraveled pretty quickly after that. Brian, tell us a little bit more about what has transpired.
Brian Barrett: Well, and I’ll start, just to clarify too, I think an important part of this is the initial email didn’t say they would be fired if they didn’t respond. The email itself just said, send us a bulleted list of five things of what you did last week. And then Elon separately on X tweeted, by the way, if you don’t write back, you’re going to be forced to resign.
Katie Drummond: I hope that all sort of 2.3 million federal workers are checking X regularly or they will apparently miss important updates about their employment status from the government.
Brian Barrett: And truly, I talked to one person who works at the federal government who has muted Elon Musk on X and had not seen it until late Monday. So that’s just part of the chaos that ensued. The other part, and the bigger picture part is that leadership at all of these agencies seemed to have no idea this was coming. It was just a bomb dropped in the middle of the weekend on the federal workforce. And because of that, there was a scramble at every agency figuring out how to respond. At NOAA, there was a sense of don’t respond yet. It might be a phishing email. Let’s figure it out. Then once they decided=
Katie Drummond: It sure seems like spam.
Brian Barrett: Yeah, it does. At other agencies, there was sort of, in general there’s a sense of like, let’s hold, let’s wait until Monday and you’ll get more guidance. Then meanwhile, some people are already writing back to the email. Some people aren’t. Some people haven’t even seen it. Then some agencies started to take a stand, including reportedly the FBI, where Kash Patel, who is maybe the most loyal of Trump loyalists in these positions, apparently drew a line and said, “No, don’t write back to this.” The State Department also said, “Absolutely not. You’re not doing this.” And then we sort of saw mixed guidance at NIH. There was sort of yes but no but yes. Other agencies didn’t get any directives. In some cases, federal judges got this email.
