International news via Reuters:

Elon Musk, the billionaire adviser tasked with radically downsizing the U.S. government, will attend President Donald Trump’s first cabinet meeting on Wednesday as turmoil continues to swirl around his plans to fire federal workers.

The meeting comes amid a tug-of-war between Musk and Trump, and officials in the U.S. government in what has become an early test of Musk’s authority.

Musk is not a cabinet officer, but no one in the president’s circle has wielded more influence in Trump’s early weeks.

Musk’s email directive that all federal workers detail their accomplishments or face losing their jobs plunged the government into chaos after some agencies told their employees to comply with his demand and others said they could ignore it.

Even after the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, the agency that oversees the federal bureaucracy, told workers they need not respond to Musk’s email, Trump and his allies seemed to suggest workers may be better off if they complied with Musk’s wishes.

Musk on Saturday said federal workers must list five things they did during the week or risk termination and gave them a 48-hour deadline to respond via email.

On Tuesday, Musk continued to press on social media for workers to respond. He was seemingly aided in that effort by Trump, who told reporters on Tuesday that the email request was “somewhat voluntary, but it’s also if you don’t answer, I guess you get fired.”

When asked on Tuesday whether Musk’s threat would be carried out, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump would defer to cabinet secretaries’ guidance for their individual workforces.

Some cabinet officers such as Kelly Loeffler, the head of the Small Business Administration, backed Musk’s demand.

“We just want to know: Are there people there doing their jobs? And again, the bar is so low it’s laughable,” Loeffler told Fox News in an interview on Tuesday.

But others, including Trump loyalists such as Kash Patel, the new FBI chief, told their employees to hold off on replying.

DOUBTING DOGE

As the back-and-forth played out, 21 workers resigned from Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency in protest on Tuesday.

“We will not use our skills as technologists to compromise core government systems, jeopardize Americans’ sensitive data, or dismantle critical public services,” the employees wrote in a resignation posted online.

Musk’s downsizing initiative has laid off more than 20,000 workers, with another 75,000 accepting buyouts, and the effort continued to accelerate on Tuesday. There are about 2.3 million civilian federal employees.

The vast majority of fired workers were in their jobs for less than a year, making them easier to lay off under civil service rules. But there were signs that DOGE was turning its attention to long-term career staff.

Internal Revenue Service executives have been told to brace for another round of job cuts beyond the nearly 12,000 employees already slated to be terminated, two people familiar with the matter said, referring to the roughly 7,000 probationary employees set to be fired and 5,000 employees taking a buyout. The cuts so far amount to more than 10% of the service’s workforce.

The Interior Department on Tuesday received a directive from OPM saying that bureaus such as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Indian Affairs should prepare plans for reductions in their workforce ranging from 10% to 40%, an Interior source told Reuters.

Musk spent much of Tuesday railing against federal judges who have stepped in to block his team from accessing sensitive systems and data at the Treasury Department, Education Department and the Office of Personnel Management and to order the administration to release frozen foreign-aid funds.

“The only way to restore rule of the people in America is to impeach judges,” Musk wrote on X. “No one is above the law, including judges.”

Reporting by James Oliphant. Editing by Noeleen Walderm and Lincoln Feast

International news via Reuters:

 On social media and at political rallies, Elon Musk has taken credit for leading the team that is cutting allegedly wasteful U.S. government spending, even waving a chain saw on stage at a conference.

In court, it’s a different story.

During a hearing on Monday in a case trying to block access by the DOGE cost-cutting team to Treasury Department systems, a federal judge repeatedly pressed a government lawyer to clarify who is running things. “Where is Mr. Musk in all of this?” asked U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly. 

“I don’t have any information beyond close adviser to the president,” responded Bradley Humphreys, an attorney for the Department of Justice.

“You can’t tell me what role he has?” the judge persisted.

Kollar-Kotelly did not say if she would block DOGE and Musk from the Treasury Department information systems as requested.

Questions about Musk’s role and the activities of the team, known as the Department of Government Efficiency, are at the heart of multiple lawsuits seeking to block them from accessing government systems and slashing programs.

MUSK’S ‘SPECIAL’ STATUS 

Many of the suits allege that Musk and DOGE are violating the Constitution by wielding the kind of vast power that only comes from agencies created through the U.S. Congress or appointments made with confirmation by the U.S. Senate. 

Despite Musk’s public assertions to the contrary, the Department of Government Efficiency operates in great secrecy.

The initial executive orders signed by President Donald Trump setting up DOGE described it primarily as an outfit to modernize software, not an agency. The Trump administration designated Musk a “special government employee.” 

Musk has been the face of DOGE since its inception, but White House Office of Administration Director Joshua Fisher said in a February 17 court filing that Musk is not the outfit’s administrator or even a DOGE employee. 

On Tuesday, the White House identified Amy Gleason as DOGE’s “acting administrator.” She did not immediately respond to a request for comment made to the Trump administration.

‘DELIBERATE OR NOT’

The scant information presented in court about who is ordering the cost-cutting and how it is working has led some judges to rule in favor of Musk and DOGE, at least for now. 

To block Musk’s efforts with a temporary restraining order, or TRO, plaintiffs must show they will suffer imminent, irreparable harm without one, a high legal bar to clear.

At a hearing last week in a case brought by unions and Democratic state attorneys general, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan in Washington said DOGE’s lack of transparency made it difficult to show it was on the verge of causing irreparable harm.

“I don’t know if that’s deliberate or not, but I will concede that it is difficult to see what’s happening next and to predict that and come in with a concrete harm,” Chutkan said at the February 17 hearing. 

The states presented her with extensive news reporting about DOGE and Musk shuttering programs, accessing confidential data, slashing funding and firing personnel. 

“It’s an understatement to say there’s a lot of news reports out there,” said Chutkan. “But the courts can’t act based on the media reports.”  

She denied a temporary restraining order to prevent DOGE from accessing sensitive information at seven agencies. The case will continue and the attorneys general will seek evidence to support a more permanent injunction.

THE GOLDILOCKS AGENCY

In some cases, however, despite noting concerns about DOGE’s opacity, judges have found there is sufficient evidence to pause its activities. 

U.S. District Judge Jeannette Vargas on Friday temporarily blocked DOGE from accessing Treasury systems responsible for trillions of dollars of payments because she found there was a realistic danger that confidential information was going to be disclosed. 

She was particularly troubled that the government did not know what information was accessed by Marko Elez, a former software engineer for Musk’s companies who resigned from DOGE on February 6.

“Even now, weeks after his departure, the Treasury Department is still reviewing his logs to determine what precisely he accessed and what he did with his access,” Vargas wrote in her Friday ruling.

Government lawyers have even used shifting definitions for DOGE, which in one instance worked in their favor.

U.S. District Judge John Bates in Washington denied a request by the unions for a temporary restraining order against Musk and DOGE. 

In doing so, Bates noted that the Trump administration argued DOGE was an agency in order to comply with a law known as the Economy Act that allowed DOGE to detail its staff to various government agencies. 

But Trump created DOGE as part of the Executive Office of the President and therefore not as an agency that is subject to the Freedom of Information Act, an open records law known as FOIA.  

The judge described DOGE in fairytale terms: “A Goldilocks entity: not an agency when it is burdensome but an agency when it is convenient.” 

Reporting by Tom Hals in Wilmington, Delaware; Additional reporting by Jack Queen in New York; Editing by Noeleen Walder, Amy Stevens and Sandra Maler