Thousands of federal workers are still not complying with President Donald Trump‘s orders to return full time to working in-person.
Elon Musk says these employees will begin facing consequences this week.
It’s been just over a month since Trump returned to the Oval Office, and nearly the same amount of time has been given to government staffers to return to the office.
Trump and Musk made it a priority to end remote and telework situations and get these workers back to federal workspaces. Many of which have remained vacant or nearly empty for years since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020.
‘Those who ignored President Trump’s executive order to return to work have now received over a month’s warning,’ Musk posted to X early Monday morning.
‘Starting this week,’ Trump’s ‘first buddy’ continued, ‘those who still fail to return to office will be placed on administrative leave.’
His threat to relieve even more federal employees from their posts came in response to a claim that half of government agency workplaces in Washington, D.C. are still half empty.
Elon Musk is now threatening administrative leave for federal workers who have refused to return to their Washington, D.C. workplaces a month after President Donald Trump issued his back to office orders
Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) wrote on X: ‘Not a single government agency is occupying even HALF of their office space. Their checks come from WE THE PEOPLE.’
‘Welcome back to work, folks,’ he added.
Musk, a CEO and owner of Tesla, SpaceX and X who is in charge of thousands of employees, has linked productivity and accountability to showing up in the office for work everyday.
He has pushed Trump to make working from federal offices a priority of his administration.
On Saturday, Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) sent an email to 2.3 million federal employees from an Office of Personnel and Management account demanding they reply with five bullet points detailing what they ‘accomplished’ at work last week.
This was met with intense backlash from saying this was too heavy of a lift for already understaffed agencies.
And bosses at the different federal departments issued conflicting guidance to their employees on whether to respond or not.
One email within the Defense Department obtained by DailyMail.com explicitly told employees ‘DO NOT respond’ to the OPM email.
Musk gave federal employees a deadline of 11:59 p.m. on Monday to reply. He claimed in a post to X about the message that any refusal or failure to respond to the email would be taken as a resignation from the worker.
Musk’s threat comes as Republicans rush to defend his Saturday evening email to 2.3 million federal employees requiring them to list five bullet points detailing what they ‘accomplished’ at work last week
Thousands of federal employees were ordered last month by Trump to end their telework or remote work situations lingering from COVID-19 and to return in-person to their respective Washington, D.C. offices full-time
The confusion among workers has led to anxiety over whether their jobs are secure if they do or do not reply to Musk’s demand.
Norman told Fox News that it’s perfectly acceptable to require employees to justify and explain what they got done in a week’s time and that taxpayers have a ‘right to know’ how their money is being spent.
‘The price tag that the taxpayers pay right now is $271 billion a year,’ Norman noted in his interview on Monday morning. ‘Is it too much to ask for them to verify why they’re making an average salary of $106,000 a year?’
‘The absurdity and, I guess, the arrogance of the workers who say ‘that’s a heavy lift,’ is – what’s wrong with them?’ the congressman added. ‘That’s what the Americans are sick and tired of.’
‘We’re the ones who are paying the bills, so we have a right to know.’
