President Trump on Wednesday warned that the roughly 1 million federal workers who did not respond to recent emails asking them to describe "five things" they accomplished are "on the bubble" suggesting they are at risk of losing their jobs.
At the first meeting with the Cabinet, Trump welcomed tech billionaire Elon Musk, head of the administration's cost-cutting team called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), who said federal workers should expect another email in an effort to figure out if workers exist.
"We're going to send another email," Musk said.
Trump called Musk's push "a good idea because, you know, those people, as I said before, they're on the bubble," he said. About half the federal workforce did not reply to initial emails sent over the weekend.
Musk also spoke at the meeting, describing the emails that asked "What did you do last week?" as a "pulse check" that anyone could do and argued, without presenting evidence, that the government is paying salaries to workers who don't exist.
"What we are trying to get to the bottom of is, we think there are a number of people on the payroll who are dead, which is probably why they can't respond -- and some people who are not real people … fictional individuals that are collecting paychecks," Musk said.
The emails sparked confusion among federal workers and apparent tension among members of Trump's Cabinet, some of whom told their workers not to immediately respond to it. At the Cabinet meeting, Trump told reporters that "everyone at this table is very much behind it."
Trump invited Cabinet members to speak up to express any dissatisfaction with Musk but quickly added "we'll throw them out" if they actually spoke up, eliciting laughter in the room.
"And some disagree a little bit, but I will tell you, for the most part, I think everyone's not only happy, they're thrilled," Trump said.
Musk, wearing a "tech support" shirt under a suit jacket while standing behind Cabinet members seated at a long table, called DOGE a "support function" for the administration. His goal, he said, was to cut $1 trillion out of the nearly $7 trillion budget this year in an effort to balance it.
Musk also acknowledged that his team had made errors, such as canceling Ebola prevention efforts while making cuts to USAID. "I think we all want Ebola prevention. So we restored the Ebola prevention immediately, and there was no interruption. But we do need to move quickly," he said.
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