Musk unleashes online army on federal workers. ‘A tough way to find out she’s losing her job.’
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. As co-director of President-elect Donald Trump’s nascent Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk has wasted no time posting to his 205 million followers about specific government departments he views as bloated.
But this week, Musk has escalated from targeting government agencies to singling out individuals—sparking his online army of followers to launch blistering critiques of ordinary federal employees. One recent post by the billionaire zeroed in on Ashley Thomas, a little-known director of climate diversification at the U.S.
International Development Finance Corp., after another user on Musk’s social-media platform X questioned her role. Musk’s repost—“So many fake jobs"—garnered 32 million views, triggering an avalanche of memes and ridicule from his followers against the employee, such as, “Sorry Ashley Thomas Gravy Train is Over." Earlier this month, in a move heralded by many of his supporters, Trump tapped Musk and biotech-company founder Vivek Ramaswamy to spearhead DOGE—sharing its name with a Musk-promoted cryptocurrency—to slash spending, regulations, and restructure federal agencies.
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed Wednesday, the two men envisioned “mass head-count reductions" across the federal bureaucracy. On Wednesday, Musk shared on X a past TV interview with Milton Friedman in which the economist recommended the elimination of a number of federal agencies, including the departments of education, commerce, agriculture and housing and urban development.
“Milton Friedman was the best," Musk said in apparent agreement. Ramaswamy in interviews has offered an unusually blunt—and likely impossible to implement—strategy for how to slash the federal workforce: firing
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