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The grind never ends at the White House, with Elon Musk's new position as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency meaning he's keeping busy in a very different capacity.
The world's richest man has batted off complaints he's initiating a 'hostile takeover' of the US government, but after President Donald Trump asked the tech billionaire to be 'more aggressive', those complaints are rearing their head once again.
As well as enforcing the POTUS' return to office mandates, Musk has also delivered an email to federal employees asking them to justify their roles.
Thousands of employees have already stepped down or been fired, while Musk has said that anyone who doesn't respond to his 'What did you do last week?' email will be in the same boat.
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Departments including the FBI have advised staff to ignore the email, while Senator Tina Smith has branded Musk a 'd*ck'.
While staff have until 11:59 p.m. EST on February 24 to reply with five bullet points explaining their accomplishments from the past week, Musk had hinted that it’s all an experiment to see whether employees are "capable of responding."
Venture capitalist Garry Tan shared a post claiming that the DOGE doesn't have the number of staff to read all responses, with the original post branding the whole thing as 'stupid' and 'performance art'.
Tan's post suggested that large language models will easily be able to sift through the thousands of replies, adding: "Most people don’t understand LLMs have changed the nature of management already, and this will be a bit of a shock to people."
Musk interjected and seemingly suggested that it's not the content of the reply that matters, but that employees reply in general: "This was basically a check to see if the employee had a pulse and was capable of replying to an email.
"This mess will get sorted out this week. Lot of people in for a rude awakening and strong dose of reality. They don’t get it yet, but they will."
Elsewhere, Musk has said the emails are a "very basic pulse check" and reiterated it should only take a couple of minutes to complete the task. He concluded that employees with "two working neurons" will be able to comply.
Despite this, the government is currently split on what to do. With heads of the FBI, then Pentagon, State Department, Department of Homeland Security, and Department of Energy telling its employees to reply, it remains to be seen whether Musk will enforce his midnight deadline, let alone show these thousands of employees the door.
