Musk says he will reduce US government role
Announcement comes as administration reveals it expects to remove civil service protections from as many as 50,000 civil servants
Elon Musk, the billionaire tech entrepreneur who is the world’s richest person and has led the development of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) for US president Donald Trump, has said that his involvement in government will “drop significantly” from next month.
Musk became a high-profile government figure following Trump’s election victory after he helped set up DOGE, which has been at the forefront of wide-ranging changes to the US federal government. The office has been at the centre of plans to cut the federal government workforce and reduce spending, with actions including offering public servants eight months’ pay to resign, and placing all staff at the international development agency USAID on administrative leave and cutting aid payments.
DOGE has also led initiatives such as requesting that federal government employees detail their work in order to plan what it calls ‘reductions-in-force’, and has been involved in steps to overhaul government technology, including actions to end the use of cheques in the US government, and centralising government technology systems to better track spending.
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Providing an update as part of the financial results for car company Tesla, of which he is the chief executive, Musk said his “time allocation to DOGE” would “drop significantly” to one to two days per week from next month.
Musk is classed as a temporary government employee. Such employees are normally limited to working 130 days a year.
Civil servants to be made ‘at will’ employees
Musk’s announcement comes as the federal Office of Personnel Management (OPM) provided details of changes to the status of federal government employees.
When Trump returned to the White House, his administration set out plans to remove civil service protections from some roles in a move that it said would increase career employee accountability and the “democratic responsiveness” of government.
The changes, under ‘Schedule Policy/Career’, would mean a number of existing nonpartisan career civil servant roles would become ‘at-will’ positions, meaning they are exempted from civil service protections related to adverse action procedures or appeals – but the posts would “remain career jobs filled on a nonpartisan basis”.
The reform was originally proposed by Trump in 2020, during his first term, but he was unable to move any workers to what was then known as ‘Schedule F’ before president Joe Biden took office and rescinded the directive. Upon returning to office, Trump reinstated the rule, stating that the change was needed to improve the accountability of the federal government.
The OPM has now set out details of how the change would work. Publishing the proposed rule for consultation, the OPM said agency supervisors report great difficulty removing employees for poor performance or misconduct, and that the proposed rule would allow policy-influencing positions to be moved into Schedule Policy/Career.
“Adverse actions” is the US federal government term for work disciplinary actions including suspension and removal from post, and the changes mean that staff could be removed without due process.
According to the OPM, removing staff for poor performance or other problems is “time-consuming and difficult”, meaning that increased flexibility is needed. It said the reform would allow government departments and agencies to “quickly remove employees from critical positions who engage in misconduct, perform poorly, or undermine the democratic process by intentionally subverting presidential directives”.
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50,000 officials could be moved to new terms
The OPM stated that a “reasonable preliminary estimate” was that 50,000 positions would be transferred to the new category – amounting to around 2% of the US federal government civilian workforce.
Some 45,000 current workers are expected to be moved to the new terms, while 5,000 vacancies would be filled by new hires upon the conclusion of the federal government’s current hiring freeze.
“The president may move a greater or smaller number of positions, but OPM believes this is a reasonable preliminary estimate,” it said.
Read more: Republicans could politicise 50,000 civil service jobs, US academic warns
However, responding to the update, the nonpartisan, nonprofit Partnership for Public Service said the move was “misguided and counterproductive and is another bad deal for the American people”.
Partnership president Max Stier said that “all civil servants swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution – not an individual president”.
“This rule will make tens of thousands of civil servants less accountable to that oath and instead make them even more susceptible to politicisation,” he said.
“The American people want and deserve a nonpartisan, expert civil service and this action is one of a series that is taking us in the exact wrong direction. The end result will be incompetence, corruption and worse government.”
Stier said that the federal government needs serious improvements, “but the way to do it is by making merit more important, not less”.
He called on the administration and Congress to “undertake an evidence-based approach to performance management and modernise processes so they work better for leaders, managers and employees alike – while maintaining the merit system principles that are the foundation of our civil service”.
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