It’s been an email battle royale. First, Department of Government Efficiency chief Elon Musk sent the chattering class into a tizzy by sending out an email to federal employees demanding that they actually specify what work they had done in the last week, then the legacy media salivated when Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, FBI Director Kash Patel and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth among others ordered their people not to respond.
“Division in the Trump administration!” the media immediately cried.
DoD, State, and FBI, all run by Trump’s men, disagree. These agencies all sent emails to their employees explicitly instructing them NOT to respond to the DOGE email. Looks like the Trump administration is a house divided against itself. https://t.co/SZUWn7U1MJ
— John Guardiano (@ResCon1) February 24, 2025
It turns out it was more of a procedural issue than an ideological one, and on Sunday—after a second DOGE email was sent out—Hegseth is all-in:
I am now directing each member of the department’s civilian federal workforce to provide 5 bullets of what they accomplished last week and comply with OPM’s email directive. https://t.co/BJOoEvVTza
— Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (@SecDef) March 2, 2025
Tell us what you’re actually doing at work, the defense secretary ordered:
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said on Sunday he is now directing all department civilian employees to respond to emails from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) asking for a recap of what they did the week prior.
“I am now directing each member of the department’s civilian workforce — just civilian — to provide those five bullets on what they accomplished in their specific jobs last week,” Hegseth said in a video posted to social media. “To reply to that email and CC their immediate supervisor.”
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He went on to explain why he initially told his people not to respond to Musk’s demand:
“It’s a simple task, really, as Elon [Musk] said, as the president recognized in our first Cabinet meeting, just a pulse check — ‘Are you there out?’ — to DOD civilians,” Hegseth continued.
Hegseth said in the video that the Department of Defense (DOD) civilian workforce would soon get a second email outlining next steps “that they need to take in order to comply with this initiative.”
Pentagon officials initially instructed employees not to respond to the first OPM email sent on Feb. 22, but Hegseth said that was only a temporary pause to allow for “a review of Pentagon procedures and consultation with the Office of Personal Management.”
He noted the department deals with sensitive issues and with matters of national security, so “we needed to be careful on that front.”
It would appear that the division with Team Trump was wildly overstated, but we’ve come to expect that from our corrupt mainstream media.
Much appreciated @SecDef Hegseth!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 2, 2025
🫡 🇺🇸
pic.twitter.com/Ll3ctnoLlx
It’s been an amazing thing to watch as leftists freak out that someone would actually ask for some accountability from employees. As numerous RedState writers have pointed out, it’s a standard practice in many businesses to require folks to justify their paychecks. Imagine being a lawyer or an accountant and saying, “You owe me $1 million, but I’m not going to detail what it is I actually did.”
"The news of my death has been greatly exaggerated," Mark Twain once famously said. The news of the Trump team’s infighting has been greatly exaggerated as well, it would seem.
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