Elon Musk’s Department of Government Inefficiency

Elon Musk showed up in Washington in January on a promise to streamline the federal government and make it run more efficiently. But over the course of just five weeks, he’s accomplished precisely the opposite: a massive and unnecessary time suck that’s pulled federal employees away from their duties on a daily basis.

Firing essential workers who need to then be rehired. Distracting agencies with directives that are reversed and then reversed again. Forcing workers back into offices where they don’t have enough desks. And provoking countless agency meetings where managers are unable to answer basic questions about the White House’s latest move. On and on it goes.

“The meetings are as clear as mud,” said Sheria Smith, a civil rights attorney at the Department of Education in Texas and president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 252. “No one knows anything. … People are being released from duty, then returned to duty. We don’t know who’s calling the shots. It’s just wildly inefficient.”

She added, “How can you be on task when you don’t even know from hour to hour whether you’re going to [have a job]?”

President Donald Trump vowed on the campaign trail to fire a lot of people and shrink the federal workforce, which numbers around 2.4 million, excluding the U.S. Postal Service. So far the administration has terminated thousands of people through legally dubious layoffs and tried to push out tens of thousands more through the also legally dubious deferred resignation program known as “Fork in the Road.”

In more than a dozen interviews, federal workers described lost hours and days as they tried to navigate an endless stream of unclear guidance as their jobs hang in the balance. Most of them spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of being fired or retaliated against.

A mental health provider at the Department of Veterans Affairs said in the wake of the “Fork” proposal they’d had four impromptu staff meetings, each up to a half-hour long, “pulling us away from veteran care.”

“In response to Saturday’s ‘what did you do last week?’ email, leadership scheduled yet another meeting first thing Monday morning — forcing me to reschedule a veteran’s appointment just to receive guidance from my leadership on how to respond,” they said.

Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, should instead be called a department of “inefficiency or ineptitude,” said Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit organization that advocates for a more effective federal government.

“They have caused unbelievable waste, unbelievable distraction from the mission, unbelievable loss of critical talent,” Stier said. “They’ve done nothing to understand the systems they’re trying to change or learn from those around them who know better.”

He added, “The federal government isn’t, in fact, a tech startup.”

Much of the wasted time stems from the White House’s hostile and confusing directives.

Some of the most critical information isn’t coming from federal agency leaders — it’s coming from the previously obscure Office of Personnel Management, and from Musk, the unelected head of a not-real federal agency. (Trump has formally renamed the U.S. Digital Service the U.S. DOGE Service, but DOGE is better understood as a White House government-cutting initiative.)

Late last week, more than 2 million workers received an email from OPM instructing them to reply with a list of five bullet points explaining what they’d accomplished during the previous week. The insulting demand was paired with a threat from Musk on X, his private social-media platform formerly known as Twitter, where he said a failure to reply would be considered “a resignation.”

Workers, union representatives and agency managers spent the weekend trying to figure out whether people actually needed to respond. Many employees got little done on Monday as unscheduled meetings were called and agency heads gave conflicting guidance on what to do.

OPM later said replying to Musk’s demand was voluntary, suggesting there would be no repercussions for ignoring it. But Trump contradicted that guidance by saying those who didn’t reply would be “fired” or “sort of semi-fired.”

Such chaos ends up having a real-world impact, said an employee of the Veterans Benefits Administration who processes disability claims. The worker receives a daily report on her productivity rate, which is based on the number of claims processed and their complexity, and she saw a roughly 20% drop on Monday as she and others were dealing with the Musk ultimatum.

In other words, veterans with disabilities stemming from their service to the country were waiting longer to have their claims processed because of confusing threats from the White House.

“People are stressed out, and that’s going to get in the way,” she explained. “We have to focus. These claims are very complex. It requires a lot of attention. We’re definitely being taken away from the focus we should be putting on the veterans.”

Another VA worker said their superiors had been “mired in daily meetings to discuss what little information we had, how it was affecting employees and overall morale, and addressing whether or not any of this is legal.”

“To estimate time loss over the course of one week, I’d say it cost us at least a full day’s productivity, if not more,” they said.

Nothing may be more wasteful than firing workers who must then be rehired. After the Trump administration’s sloppy firing of probationary employees, agencies had to try to hastily reinstate workers who oversee nuclear weapons, manage the power grid and fight bird flu.

Among them were more than two dozen workers at the Bonneville Power Administration, a federal power supplier in the Pacific Northwest managed under the Energy Department.

Mike Braden, a Bonneville Power Administration employee and president of its employee union, said that by the time the workers were rehired they had already lost their access to the IT systems and their clearance to enter buildings. The advice from management upon their return was to “pretend like nothing happened.”

“There’s no thought to this, no coordination with the agencies,” Braden said of the White House. “We have all this disruption, and we can’t figure out how things are going to work moving forward.”

He said his phone is buzzing nonstop with questions from members about emails or memos from OPM or posts online from Musk.

“I’m getting hit up all through the weekend, all throughout the evening,” he said. “Somebody will ping me, ‘Hey I just saw this — what does this mean?’ I’m like, ’Aw shit.’”

Paul Dobias, a Department of Navy engineer and president of his union, said agency managers are so afraid of appearing hostile to the Trump administration’s goals that they seem to pass along guidance without review. Many of those managers, he noted, could lose their civil service protections under Trump’s Schedule F scheme.

“It just goes right through their doors where nobody takes the time to go and sit down and figure out, ′Does this all add up and make sense?′” Dobias said. “I’ve seen a number of documents where it [appears] there’s like five or six different people generating the documents … and they’re not talking with each other.”

The turbulence has created an enormous amount of work for federal employees who also are union representatives and help enforce collective bargaining agreements. Coworkers are coming to them more than ever for clarity — and in many cases managers are steering them to the union representatives because the managers themselves don’t have answers.

Smith, the union president at the Education Department, said supervisors seem to be at a loss when they’re peppered with questions in online staff meetings about the administration’s latest directive. She said she’s heard a variation of one particular nonanswer more than once.

“They’ll say, ‘We all got the same email,’” Smith said.