Are federal employees at risk of being fired at midnight Monday if they don’t respond to an Elon Musk email?
President Trump said on Monday that Mr. Musk’s email demanding that federal workers justify their jobs was “ingenious” and “great” and repeated Mr. Musk’s written warning: “If you don’t answer, you’re sort of semi-fired or you’re fired.”
But even as televisions played Mr. Trump’s comments, his personnel department informed agencies that responding to the Musk email was now “voluntary” and that failing to respond would not be considered a resignation, as Mr. Musk had indicated.
The nearly simultaneous messages added to days of confusion after Mr. Musk’s weekend email fractured Mr. Trump’s cabinet, with the leaders of some departments ordering their employees to comply and others directing workers to ignore the threat.
The dissent among the top ranks of Mr. Trump’s administration was rare for a president whose demands for absolute loyalty have resulted in dramatic executive actions by his subordinates, all acting in lock step to quickly push through Mr. Trump’s agenda.
Numerous top officials defied Mr. Musk, urging their employees to “pause” or “not respond” to the demand for a description of five things they did the previous week. Employees at the Departments of State, Defense, Energy, Homeland Security and Justice were all flatly told not to comply.
“For now, D.O.E. employees are asked to please pause on any direct response to the O.P.M. email,” Chris Wright, the secretary of energy, said in a weekend email. A top State Department official wrote, “No employee is obligated to report their activities outside of their department chain of command.”
At the same time, the president’s handpicked leaders at the Treasury, the General Services Administration, the Department of Transportation and the Office of Management and Budget told employees to follow Mr. Musk’s weekend directive. A Treasury email said, “You are directed to respond to this message before the deadline,” adding that “we expect that compliance will not be difficult or time-consuming.”
Mr. Trump on Monday downplayed the differences among members of his team. During a meeting with President Emmanuel Macron of France, Mr. Trump responded to questions about the leaders of agencies who had told employees not to respond to Mr. Musk’s email.
“They don’t mean that in any way combatively with Elon,” he said, suggesting that those responses were prompted by concerns about security at agencies like the F.B.I. “They’re just saying there are some people that you don’t want to really have them tell you what they’re working on last week. But other than that, I think everyone thought it was a pretty ingenious idea.”
The split among advisers came just two days before Mr. Trump is set to convene his first full cabinet meeting of his second term at the White House on Wednesday. Eight years ago, his first cabinet meeting turned into a session of gushing, “dear leader” praise for Mr. Trump as his top aides extolled, as one put it, the “blessing” of working for the president.
That could still happen again on Wednesday. People in Mr. Trump’s current orbit have repeatedly sung his praises in recent weeks. After a meeting with Russian officials last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said over and over again that “Trump is the only leader who can bring peace to Ukraine.”
Since Mr. Trump took office, his most senior officials have aggressively implemented the president’s demand for a smaller government, free of what Republicans call “woke” ideology. Thousands of employees have been fired or put on leave. Entire agencies, like the U.S. Agency for International Development, have been all but shuttered. Remote workers have been told to return to the office or be fired.
But the response to the email suggests that there may be limits to how far Mr. Musk, acting on Mr. Trump’s behalf as the leader of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, can push the bureaucracy.
Emails to several members of the White House press office, including Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary, did not receive a response.
Madeleine Ngo and Nicholas Nehamas contributed reporting from Washington, and Kate Conger from San Francisco.
