Musk’s DOGE To Use AI To Recommend Firings Of Federal Workers From Emails Justifying Their Jobs

by Angie SchlagerFebruary 26, 2025, 3:28 pmNews >

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by tech billionaire Elon Musk, plans to use artificial intelligence to assess federal workers’ responses to a Musk-directed email asking them to detail what they accomplished in the past week. The initiative is part of the Trump administration’s broader efforts to reduce federal spending, in part by removing inactive staff and cutting jobs that are mostly probationary positions.

DOGE, created under Trump’s administration, has fired over 20,000 federal government workers and frozen billions in federal grants and foreign aid.

An email from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management with the subject line ‘What did you do last week?” was sent to federal workers over the weekend, asking them to provide information justifying their positions. Musk took to X on Saturday, urging staffers to respond.

“Consistent with President Trump’s instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week,” his post reads. “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”

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He later added in a separate post that the email was “to see who had a pulse and two working neurons.” An additional post from the DOGE leader reads, “Subject to the discretion of the president, they will be given another chance. Failure to respond a second time will result in termination.”

DOGE will allegedly feed the responses into a Large Language Model (LLM), an anonymous source told NBC News. The advanced AI system will process the information and assess whether or not an employee’s role is deemed necessary.

LLM is a type of AI that can recognize and analyze a large amount of text and generate a summary.

In another post on X on Monday, Musk said, “No LLM needed here. This was basically a check to see if the employee had a pulse and was capable of replying to an email.”

The message directly from OPM did not mention resignation but asked workers to reply with “approximately five bullets of what you accomplished last week” and copy their managers.

Many department leaders, including those from the Department of Defense, State Department and FBI, reached out to their staff, urging them not to respond. Other departments and agencies, such as the Department of Transportation, told staffers to reply to the email. By Monday, personnel offices had informed employees that responses to the Office of Personnel Management’s request were “voluntary.”

“So many failed even that inane test, urged on in some cases by their managers,” Musk wrote. “Have you ever witnessed such INCOMPETENCE and CONTEMPT for how YOUR TAXES are being spent?”

DOGE has been extremely controversial in its short life. Last week, the head of the Social Security Administration resigned rather than give DOGE staffers access to confidential taxpayer information.