‘Flat out wrong’: Ga. federal workers react to DOGE ultimatum
ATLANTA, Ga. (Atlanta News First) - Georgia federal workers had until midnight on Monday to respond to a confusing request that tasked them with listing weekly accomplishments – although billionaire Elon Musk later gave them a “another chance.”
Musk, who’s been placed in charge of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, sent a notice to all federal workers demanding they provide five bullet points listing accomplishments from the week before.
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“Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation,” Musk said.
It immediately sent workers and supervisors scrambling to figure out if the email was lawful — or even legitimately from the government.
“It really caused a lot of unnecessary chaos over the weekend,” said Doreen Greenwald, president of the National Treasury Employees Union. “It hit without anybody knowing what it was intended to do. So it sent everybody scrambling to first figure out is it even a trues email? And second of all, how should employees respond?”
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Many union heads instructed their not to reply to the email while they sought guidance on the legality of the request.
Among the unions trying to make sense of the email was the American Federation for Government Employees, which represents over 750,000 federal workers across dozens of agencies.
“We had a healthy dose of skepticism as to whether or not that was going to be enforceable,” said Antonio Gaines, president of the AFGE Council 222 and an employee of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. “I just think it is a huge disruption and an unnecessary disruption.”
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Gaines advised his not to respond to the email while the union works to determine the legality. He also showed communication from the Office of Personnel Management indicating the email was legitimate, but voluntary for employees.
There are approximately 70,000 current civilian federal workers in Georgia and 44,000 in the City of Atlanta. Since President Donald Trump took office, an estimated 200,000 federal workers have been laid off or resigned from the civic service.
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Gaines has been shocked at the methods the Trump istration has been using to slash the civic workforce, especially the latest email from Musk.
“I don’t think any federal employee has a problem listing the things, the accomplishments, that they’ve had over the last week,” said Gaines. “I think it’s more Mr. Musk trolling federal employees sort of insulting us and continuing to stick his thumb in our eye.”
Gaines isn’t against rooting out waste in the government, but he said federal employees aren’t the place to start. He recommends leaders look at the government procurement process, which he likened to “corporate welfare” for lucrative but unnecessarily large contracts, and the appropriations process instead.
“Federal employees, writ-large, represent 8% of the American budget,” he said. “And to try to use federal employees as the boogeyman or the poster child of all these problematic issues is just flat out wrong and disrespectful.”
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On Monday, Georgia lawmakers also ed a measure that would establish a program similar to Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE for short. SB 28, named the Rad Tape Rollback Act, would require Georgia agencies to review their budgets every four years to trim fat by cutting programs and possibly even personnel.
“You never like to see anybody lose their jobs but you also have to always be looking at how to run any business or any agency or anything more efficiently,” said Lt. Gov. Burt Jones,.
Jones said he didn’t see mass layoffs of state employees under the Georgia DOGE bill, but said federal agencies shouldn’t be surprised that Trump is following up on a campaign promise to cut the federal workforce.
“What they’re doing right now is exactly what they said they were going to do,” said Jones.
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