Musk appears to be bringing his Twitter takeover playbook to the public sector, and, as they did at the social media company, his moves are causing chaos and confusion for federal workers.
The richest man in the world has attempted to reduce costs and gut entire departments, including by playing a role in an ultimatum email to federal workers with the same subject line — “Fork in the Road” — that more than two years ago, topped an email asking Twitter staff to commit to working “extremely hardcore” under Musk’s new leadership or resign.
The consequences this time around are potentially much more serious: Twitter is a social media platform; the federal government has a direct impact on the lives of billions of people in the United States and around the world. But Musk’s takeover of Twitter could foreshadow what may happen next for US government workers.
Musk, DOGE, and X did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
Cut to the bone
Like he did when taking over Twitter, Musk has framed his actions within the federal government in dire terms, as necessary to reduce wasteful spending and save democracy.
But a former senior employee at Twitter, who worked extensively under Musk before leaving the company, told CNN the moves are also in keeping with the billionaire’s “algorithm that he touts as his … keys to success with anything.”
“[B]asically, question every requirement, assume that every requirement that anybody ever gives you is dumb. Question it, eliminate it wherever possible,” they said. “I remember him directly saying, ‘If you’re not adding things back in afterward, then you weren’t cutting hard enough to start with.’”
Two former Twitter employees asked not to be named so they could speak freely about their time at the company and avoid any potential retaliation from Musk.
Within hours of acquiring Twitter, Musk had fired its top executives; within days, he’d laid off around 3,500 employees, around 50% of the company’s total staff. Ultimately, he trimmed 80% of Twitter’s workforce, demanded everyone return to the office, and often required employees to work far more than 40 hours a week.
Musk’s DOGE, with its goal of cutting potentially trillions of dollars out of the federal budget, is making similar cuts throughout government: the United States Agency for International Development appears to be in the process of shutting down; two sources told CNN the Office of Personnel Management was directed to prepare to eventually cut as much as 70% of its workforce; and the General Services Administration was told to present proposals to cut 50% of business expenses, according to multiple sources with knowledge fo the situation.
“Elon seems to think that he’s bought the federal government now, and he’s playing out the same series of events” as he did at Twitter, said Shannon Liss-Riordan, an attorney who represents thousands of former Twitter employees who took legal action against the company after Musk’s takeover.
The ultimatum
Federal government employees have been told they now have until Thursday to decide whether to remain in their roles and accept the Trump administration’s new demands, which include being “reliable, loyal, trustworthy,” or to resign and accept a buyout paying them through September. But if they take the deal, they may not necessarily be able to count on the money.
“It’s not clear whether the President has the authority to even guarantee that, given that federal funding has not been authorized by Congress through September, given that there are likely to be legal challenges by some conservative groups that might challenge the government continuing to pay employees who are not doing work,” Liss-Riordan said, adding that she’s already heard from federal workers with questions on the legality of the offer.
Federal employees may also be expected to work — rather than looking for new jobs — through that September date. The resignation letter that federal government employees have been asked to sign says: “I will assist my employing agency with completing reasonable and customary tasks and processes to facilitate my departure.” And workers may face legal hurdles to getting other jobs while still on the government’s payroll.
Thousands of former Twitter employees took legal action against the company after Musk’s layoffs, alleging that they were promised greater severance payments than they were given, most of which are still making their way through the courts or confidential legal proceedings. X has moved to handle many of the claims in private arbitration or dismiss them outright, court filings show.
But for federal employees, “unfortunately, it is very difficult to sue the federal government,” Liss-Riordan said.
“I’m giving similar advice to what I gave employees who came to me when the fork in the road email went out to Twitter employees, which is that you need to decide what’s in your best interests, and there’s no way to predict exactly how this is going to come out,” she said.
“This is a rare, generous opportunity — one that was thoroughly vetted and intentionally designed to support employees through restructuring,” OPM spokesperson McLaurine Pinover said in a statement. She added that employees who take the offer will be placed on leave and not expected to continue working for the bulk of the period while they are paid out through September.
A memo released by OPM leaders on Tuesday also noted: “Were the government to backtrack on its commitments, an employee would be entitled to request a rescission of his or her resignation.
Bull in a china shop
Musk has been implementing DOGE’s cuts for less than a month and already there are several lawsuits filed over the group’s actions, questioning the legality of everything from shutting down an entire agency to whether the personal data of millions of employees is being properly protected.
But former Twitter employees say Musk sees laws, regulations, and procedures as unnecessary speed bumps meant to be ignored.
“Elon thinks that all that stuff [laws and regulations] is frankly, just bulls**t, and it’s just there to be harassment,” the former senior employee said.
“Regulations should be default gone,” Musk said during an X spaces conversation last week. “Not default there, default gone. And if it turns out that we missed the mark on a regulation, we can always add it back in.”
For example, in an infamous incident, the billionaire unexpectedly forced a Twitter team to take one of the company’s data centers offline for cost savings on Christmas Eve in 2022. According to the former senior employee, the best practice would have been for the servers to be wiped clean for data privacy reasons, but they were not.
“When we were going to shut down this data center, the people from the data center team worked with him, and were saying, ‘Look, if we want to do this and do it safely, it’s going to take … like six months or eight months,’” the former senior employee said. “(Musk’s) like, ‘Ah, f**k that.’”
Former Twitter employees said that while Musk’s pronouncements and changes can be disruptive, they aren’t always set in stone and they can backfire.
Some staff that resigned or were laid off were asked to return, former employees said, as the company realized valuable skills and experience had been lost.
In the months after Twitter shut down the data center nearly overnight, the platform suffered numerous major outages and technical glitches. Although the platform has largely stabilized, it is still prone to snafus — most famously the massive meltdowns that delayed live interviews on X between Musk and presidential candidates — including Trump and Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
“Musk leads very much like a bull in a china shop that, through the mere force of his desires, his impulsiveness and his will, he tries to do something very immediately bold and disruptive,” a former manager at Twitter who left the company the year Musk took over told CNN. But “the bluster and the disruption that he leads without the gate is often not the end of the story … You cannot lose sight of the institutional means that you have to push back on some of this disruption, even if it proceeds more slowly.”
Indeed, there have been examples of Musk taking a strong public stand on an issue, only to reverse course after facing resistance.
In recent years, the Brazilian Supreme Court ordered X to block a number of accounts, mostly belonging to political supporters of far-right former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, that it said contained hate speech.
Musk pushed back hard against the request, saying X would close its operations and fire its staff in Brazil, calling the order censorship and the judge who issued the order an “evil dictator.” But ultimately, after a three-week shutdown of the platform in Brazil, X agreed to the Brazilian government’s demands to be reinstated.
“Many times, the real outcome of these very dramatic situations, they may happen weeks and months later, but the reality of what comes out very quietly is quite different from what Musk wanted in the first place,” the former manager said.
Advice
Former Twitter employees are now offering advice to federal government workers about how to navigate Musk’s leadership — from practical tips such as keeping records of the changes or communicating securely through encrypted platforms like Signal to more personal guidance about living through such upheaval.
“As someone who went through an eerily similar episode of hostile takeover that also played out in public in real time, I want to tell all the fed workers, ‘I’m so sorry this is happening to you, I know how this feels,’” Yao Yue, former principal software engineer at Twitter wrote on X.
She added: “Don’t comply without question, don’t fold over in advance. Find small routines that anchor you and make you feel in control, even just for a few moments each day.”
For federal government workers who might now be looking to preserve work they care about, the former senior employee said Musk “likes it when people refer to things positively. He doesn’t like to hear the negatives about things. He’s generally not a fan of adjectives when you communicate with him.”
But, the former senior employee warned “if somebody is asking you to do something that is beyond the pale, make sure that you know you’re clear that, hey, this is not how this is supposed to work. Because at the end of the day, they don’t care, whatever the fastest path is to something is what they’re going to take.”
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