In some very epic comments that followed Elon Musk’s already infamous email to all federal civilian workers asking what they accomplished in the last week and demanding they reply by midnight on Monday, February 24, President Donald Trump torched a woke reporter who was attacking the idea and defended the Department of Government Efficiency.
That came when the reporter asked about officials telling employees to ignore DOGE, asking, “Sir, do you think that DOGE could benefit from more streamlined communications? There was that email telling employees to give five things that they’ve done last week. Agency heads then told people to ignore it.”
Trump fired back, saying, “The last email that was sent where he wanted to know what you did this week. You know why you wanted that, by the way? I thought it was great, because we have people that don’t show up to work, and nobody even knows if they work for the government. So by asking the question, tell us what you did this week.”
Continuing, Trump said, “What he’s doing is saying, ‘Are you actually working?’ And then if you don’t answer, like you’re sort of semi fired, or you’re fired because a lot of people are not answering because they don’t even exist. They’re trying to find that’s how badly various parts of our government were run by it, especially by this last group.”
Trump further added, defending the move, that it is important to find out where the government’s money is going. He said, “So what they’re doing is they’re trying to find out who’s working for the government. Are we paying other people that aren’t working? And you know, where is all that? Where’s the money going?”
Further, Trump noted that much fraud has already been discovered and that the gold might be missing from Fort Knox. He said, “We have found hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud so far, and we’ve just started, we’re actually going to Fort Knox to see if the gold is there, because maybe somebody stole the gold, tons of gold.”
Hea added that the note was “genius,” saying, “So I think it was actually there was a lot of genius in sending it. We’re trying to find out if people are working and so we’re sending a letter to people. Please tell us what you did last week. If people don’t respond, it’s very possible that there is no such person or they’re not working.”
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The same reporter then chimed back in and snappe,d “Some of the agency heads instructed their employees not to respond because they’re waiting on further guidance, but Elon Musk tweet said a failure to respond would be taken as a resignation. So there’s been a disconnect in communications. Are you concerned at all?”
Responding, Trump said, quite funnily and confidently, “No, no, no. That was done in a friendly manner, only things such as perhaps Marco at State Department, where they have very confidential things, or the FBI, where they’re working on confidential things. And they don’t mean that in any way combatively with Elon.”
Explaining what is really going on with the agency heads, Trump said, “They’re just saying there are some people that you don’t want to really have them tell you what they’re working on last week. But other than that, I think everyone thought it was a pretty ingenious idea. We have to find out where these people are, who are they? And we said, If you don’t respond, we assume you’re not around, and that holds, that stands, and you’re not getting paid anymore, too. So, you know, we’re doing a real job. And we just had a poll come out, I guess the Harvard poll saying that it’s massively popular what we’re doing.”
Watch him here:
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video