Who’s the boss in Washington? An unelected, chaotic billionaire thinks he is | Moira Donegan

If you work for the federal government, it has become clear that Elon Musk thinks that he is your boss. The world’s richest man and patron of far-right causes worldwide has taken on his bizarre and extra-constitutional role in the Trump administration with an unexpected enthusiasm, enlisting a small squadron of college-aged boys to drastically cut spending across vast swaths of the sprawling US bureaucracy. His efforts have led to public health and safety crises in America, humanitarian emergencies abroad, economic devastation in families and communities that depend on federal employment, and the end of large amounts of American scientific and medical research. He has helped cut off funding for cancer research and Ebola prevention; he has ended services for disabled children, abused women and victims of consumer fraud.

Musk has said that he aims to cut the federal budget by $2tn, though he has dramatically overstated the amount of spending cuts that he has achieved thus far – and does not seem to understand that some of these expenditures, such as the ones that prevent mass injury or disease, may in fact save the government money. Congress, for its part, is playing along. On Tuesday, House Republicans passed a budget resolution that dramatically cuts funding to Medicaid, the federal program that provides healthcare coverage to low-income Americans. But much of Musk’s slash-and-burn project to eliminate the functioning of the government comes from firing federal workers – which he seems to think he has the authority to do at will.

This was the logic behind an email that Musk sent on Saturday to all federal employees – including those decidedly not working in executive agencies, such as federal judges. The email, subject line “What did you do last week?”, asked every federal employee to list five “bullet points” describing their recent working accomplishments. Musk later stipulated on X, his social media platform, that anyone who did not respond by midnight on Monday night would be fired. With one missive, Musk appointed himself the manager of every single one of the federal government’s estimated 2.3 million employees. Report to him, they were told, or lose your jobs.

Chaos ensued. Some employees said that responding to such an email would put them in legal danger, since they work on sensitive or classified material. Others were weary of auditioning for positions they already held, and submitting their work for the appraisal of an unelected billionaire whose claim to authority over their jobs has no legal basis. Supervisors were swamped with calls from their employees, asking what they should do about the email; they, in turn, tried to get clarity from upper management.

At some agencies, work was derailed as teams spent time trying to figure out what to do with Musk’s demand; at others, employees who had gone home for the weekend had to come back into work because they could not access their work emails for instructions from their home computers. People were calling their bosses, their union reps, their colleagues, confused and panicked, wondering what would happen to them if they lost their health insurance or couldn’t make their car payment.

It did not help matters that different government departments responded to Musk’s ultimatum with different instructions for their employees. Some told workers to respond to the email; others told them not to. A hastily assembled group of officials from defense and intelligence agencies spent the weekend trying to figure out a coordinated response, with the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and the FBI head, Kash Patel, ultimately telling their staff to ignore it. Agencies including the Departments of State, Energy, Justice, and Defense also told their workers not to respond. But others, such as the Departments of Commerce, Education and Transportation, told their employees that they should comply. Things only got more confusing on Monday when the office of personnel management, the federal government’s HR body, through which Musk initially sent the mass email, tried to back off the billionaire’s demand, telling the management of various government entities that it would be up to each to determine how to direct its employees to respond. But then Donald Trump appeared to reiterate Musk’s initial demand, saying in the Oval Office of federal workers who did not respond to Musk’s email: “If you don’t answer, like, you’re sort of semi-fired or you’re fired.”

Who, exactly, is in charge here? The frightening speed with which the new Trump administration has pursued its sadistic agenda and frightening and unconstitutional expansion of executive powers can tend to obscure just how incompetent these people are. Two million federal workers now do not know whether their boss is the person above them on the org chart, or an erratic billionaire. Trying to figure it out required them to spend time in hectic and undignified scrambling, figuring out whether they would be obliged to grovel for their livelihoods or not. They spent time catering to the senseless and stupid demands of Musk’s ego, and because they had to spend their time that way, they could not spend it on their actual work.

Not to mention that Musk, in his demand to control all federal employees and to rewrite the budgets and missions of federal agencies at a whim, seems to be pissing some people off. Members of the Trump cabinet have been leaking their displeasure with Musk over the past week, trying to assert control over their agencies and defend their turf. They, after all, have the Senate confirmations; they, after all, have the mandate of being selected by the president. It is yet to be seen whether any of that will hold a candle to what Musk has: the money.

So far, the future is not looking bright for agency independence. Musk, who is not a cabinet member, appeared on Tuesday at a meeting of Trump’s cabinet and lectured the assembled agency heads just hours after the initial deadline had passed for their employees to report to him. Trump seemed to signal to the cabinet members that they should assume that an order from Musk was as good as an order from him. “Is anybody unhappy with Elon?” Trump asked, according to the New York Times. The response? “Nervous laughter rippled around the table.”

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist