Elon Musk addressed concerns over last week’s controversial federal worker productivity email, insisting the directive was not a performance review but a basic check for signs of life.
“I think that email was perhaps interpreted as a performance review, but actually it was a pulse check review. Do you have a pulse?” Musk said during a Cabinet meeting Wednesday. “And if you have a pulse and two neurons, you could reply to an email.”
The request, sent in coordination with the Office of Personnel Management, asked over 1 million federal employees to submit a bullet-point list of their weekly work accomplishments. Musk argued that the exercise was a necessary step to uncover potential fraud within the government payroll.
“But what we are trying to get to the bottom of is, we think there are a number of people on the government payroll who are dead, which is probably why they can’t respond,” Musk said. “And some people who are not real people … like they’re fictional individuals collecting a paycheck. Well, somebody is collecting paychecks on a fictional individual.”
Musk, serving as a special advisor to President Trump, tied the initiative to his broader mission of cutting government waste.
“We simply cannot sustain a country on $2 trillion deficits,” Musk warned, emphasizing that the US is spending more on interest payments than on the Department of Defense. “If this continues, the country will go bankrupt. It’s not an optional thing.”
Despite acknowledging the intense scrutiny he has faced, Musk remained confident that DOGE—the Department of Government Efficiency—could achieve $1 trillion in savings.
“We do need to move quickly,” Musk said. “If we’re to achieve $1 trillion deficit reduction in financial year 2026, it requires saving $4 billion per day every day from now through the end of September. But we can do it. And we will do it.”