More chaos and confusion from Elon Musk as federal workers waste time trying to figure out whether or not to answer an email. Democrats are trying to find a way to strike back at Musk and President Trump. And are there cracks or even slight fissures between Republicans and Trump? What about between Republicans and Musk? What about Musk and Trump?
Stay tuned to find out. Welcome to Sidebar from the Washington Post. I am your host, Libby Casey, and I'm here with Rhonda Colvin, senior political correspondent and James Homan, editorial writer and columnist. And let's start with the action today. Rhonda, you are here fresh from being at the Capitol where Democrats were assembling. What is their play right now? It's fresh from the Capitol. I probably look like that windswept reporter who raced back to their desk. What's going on on the Hill is pretty significant right now, and it shows that the Capitol may be in the midst of starting a budget battle. Of course, government funding is due March 14th for the government to remain funded for the remainder of the year. And to stay open.
open. So yes, we're in that sort of looming shutdown world right now. But what we're seeing and what I saw today was House Democrats decided to gather their entire caucus and go to the east front of the Capitol and just be on the steps. And just some background for people who aren't familiar with seeing lawmakers all the time. They rarely are in the same place at the same time, other than on the House floor. So seeing them all together there, and they were behind their leader, Hakeem Jeffries, and they confirmed that they are not going to vote for this budget deal that is upcoming. So here's what Leader Jeffries had to say. Families will be devastated. People with disabilities will be devastated. Seniors will be devastated. Hospitals.
will be devastated nursing homes will be devastated so let me be clear house democrats will not provide a single vote to this reckless republican budget not one So House Democrats also invited people from the public to speak about what a budget deal that might involve Medicaid cuts, what that would do to them and their families. They're really leveraging people who are very upset right now with some of the things going on with the Trump administration, with Doge. And this is a part of their playbook right now. They really can't do a lot given that they are in the minority, but they have been saying we are going to try to have a groundswell, you know, from the bottom up from Americans and have that be the pressure put on Republicans. As we are taping this on the Hill, the Republicans are trying to figure out if they're going to bring up the framework for a budget, if they're going to bring it up today. A big, beautiful bill. A big, beautiful bill. That is what they are calling it. It's like my big bill, right?
Right. One huge bill that would fund the government, but also include tax cuts that Trump wants to return to that were implemented in his first term. A lot of people are feeling queasy about that. Democrats, of course, but Republicans, too, who know that when they go back to their districts, people are having a hard time understanding why would you cut programs in order to give tax cuts? So we don't know how this vote is going to shake out right now. And this is just framework. This is not the legislation to fund the government. So it's the early steps. But it is showing us that, hey, Democrats are showing that they have leverage. Right now, we've been saying it a few times on this podcast that Republicans only have a three seat majority. So that really that almost is like a tie sometimes in legislative math. That's so super close.
And Democrats know that. So they are standing firm. They're not going to vote for this. You have Republicans who say, I don't know if I can sell this to my district. So we really don't know what House Republicans will come up with. And they're being pressured by the White House to stand firm and to do this thing and deliver for Trump. So we're going to see where this shakes out. So there's the bill, but then there's also the looming deadline on March 14th. And it can be this game of chicken. Like, who is actually willing to shut down the government? There's some irony and some real soul searching among Democrats, though, James, who are like, are we really going to stand together?
shut down the government, essentially, by not moving forward on anything. Republicans can't get it together on their own at a time when we are decrying Elon Musk and Republicans tearing apart the federal government. This is an early test for Hakeem Jeffries as the leader who wants to be speaker come the year after next. And they have a lot more leverage in the negotiations if they project this united front, which they really did today at the Capitol steps. So I think Democrats don't want to shut down. But there's a sense of fatalism when I talk to folks on the Hill among Republicans and Democrats that we're going to have a shutdown, as one member put it. It's either going to be eight hours or eight weeks. And so I think Democrats feel like they're not going to get blamed for shutting down the government. Republicans have a trifecta.
They've got to figure it out. All right, let's move on to You've Got Mail. This email that went out from Elon Musk caused such disruption and like shockwaves through the system. Now, let's be clear. It wasn't because people were asked to enumerate five things they did last week. Fair to say, James?
It's the process, the chaos, the mess, the fact that it happened on a Saturday afternoon when Trump said Elon should be more aggressive. And then Elon, who the government said in court last week, doesn't have any official role in Doge, that he's not running Doge, that he's merely advising the president and isn't issuing directives. And then Musk goes on Twitter, a platform he owns, X, and says, if you don't respond to this email by midnight on Monday, we're going to take that as if you've resigned. And then they send out this email that looks like a phishing spam attempt. And it goes out to everyone. I mean, it's exactly the kind of thing that companies and agencies say, do not click on this. And then it says, like, who's your manager?
or what specifically do you do? And it did catch all these people off guard. It caught the senior White House officials sort of off guard that this was going out and how it was going to look. And then you had a pretty remarkable... brushback very quickly. Cash Patel, who just got confirmed as FBI director, sent an email in his own name saying, don't respond to this. I'm in charge of the FBI. I'm going to make the decisions about personnel. Then Tulsi Gabbard, the Senate confirmed director of national intelligence, sent a similar email saying it would undermine national security. You're all in sensitive roles. Don't be telling people outside the agency. It's just so like, I don't mean to laugh, but it's like mind boggling to be like literally writing down the top secret and very sensitive things that you did and putting in an email and sending it to like Elon Musk. Yeah. And so ultimately by Monday afternoon, there was this call where the office.
personnel management, which is basically the HR department of the government. They told all the HR leaders at every agency, like, look, not only do you not have to fill this out, we don't even know how we're going to look at the ones that have already come in and we don't have any plan to follow up. And then this afternoon at her briefing, White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt claimed that more than a million federal employees responded to the email with their five bullet points. Now, we don't have any proof of that, but that would make sense. There were some agencies like the Interior Department where they were told, go ahead and email back.
some were told though send it to your like send something to your supervisor tell your supervisor save this so we have it documented they have not been in like defiance of Elon Musk's directive, but you're not sending it to external parties and stuff like that. I mean, Rhonda, what do the unions have to say about this? Because there was a lot of like huddling and trying to figure out what can be allowed, what can be done, how do we respond? Yeah, ever since that first email went out shortly after Trump was inaugurated that was geared toward getting federal workers to take a buyout. Forking the road. Right. A lot of the unions, and I spoke to a union leader for federal workers, who said there's so much confusion because as you said, these are emails that no one would believe they're receiving. They don't know what to do with it. You might think it's a virus. I mean,
That's part of the optics of all of this and why there is such backlash right now is it's not necessarily what's happening, it's how it's being done. It's over email or there's X post by Elon Musk. It's not going through the proper channels that federal workers or really anyone in government is used to. And it's coming from an agency that is not a federal agency. It's sort of a pseudo.
agency that no one really knows what the contours are right now so that's part of the problem is that no one knows if any of this is for real and how to respond to it musk floated on x this idea that people who didn't respond it was because they either weren't working or like they didn't exist or they were dead like that there were what placeholder positions or something james like i don't they're using uh dead people's social security numbers and basically getting paychecks from the government and not doing any work it's absurd not true uh and you know there are There's more than 2.3 million federal workers. Not all of them even have email accounts. You think about like a gardener or a security guard or like all TSA staff. And so people on leave, maternity leave, paternity leave. And so it clearly wasn't.
thought through. I mean, I sort of interpreted it as the first real evidence that Musk is sort of running out of ideas and is desperate to create the impression of forward progress, that he's doing something, that he's picking a fight. He achieved his desired goal of freaking people out and getting everyone, including federal workers, spun up over the weekend. He also achieved a goal, if I may, of having people say, well, what's the big deal? Write down five things you did. So it did create an upset and then create a little mini backlash. Republicans are on the Sunday show saying, like Jim Jordan, like, I can tell you what I did last week. I went to Israel. I did this. I did that. So it's like pitting federal workers against other people. Trying to make them look like they're whiny or babies or something. And it reflects a...
disdain for the federal workforce. I mean, that's ultimately the heart of the way Elon Musk and Donald Trump are talking about the federal workforce. They really do think that there's this so-called deep state or the cathedral, as they sometimes call it, that they want to demolish. And they see most federal workers not just as lazy, but as like, in some cases, evil. And they have this totally wild, wrong perception of who these folks actually are, as we've talked about in past weeks. Okay, so in the end, if I follow this correctly, you didn't have to reply to the email or more time was given to reconsider this whole thing. What's the point? Like, was there damage done? Was there nothing done? Was it just a waste of taxpayer dollars because all the...
time that was spent trying to figure out what to do on this? It was a fire drill. I mean, it was, so Elon Musk tweeted on Monday night, like this time, because of the president's graciousness, you don't have to respond, but there's going to be another time that we're going to do this again. And Caroline Levitt, the press secretary said that Elon Musk is going to go to the cabinet meeting on Wednesday and talk to the cabinet secretaries. So, I mean, it's not, let's just pause there.
Because Donald Trump is meeting with his cabinet, which is a big like pomp and circumstance moment. Usually have the photographers come in, the videographers come in, they capture it. It's like this really significant time for an administration to show their unity, their strength. They've got these people who've been all confirmed, except Elise Stefanik, of course, because they can't afford to lose her in the house right now. They need that vote before she can go be at the UN. Elon Musk is going to be in the room.
So you kind of just breezed over that, James, but it's a big deal because who is he and what is he? Yeah, I mean, he has a White House email address. He has an office that was in the Eisenhower Executive Office building right next to the White House. It's the office that was formerly used by the Secretary of War before the Pentagon was built. So it's a really nice office. He has like this computer setup. It's sort of like a tech startup vibe in there. And he's been sleeping in the office some days. And so he has a shocking amount of power because Donald Trump is letting him sort of...
run roughshod over the government. Yeah, I've been wondering if we're going to see more of this backpedaling like emails and then wait, that was a bridge too far. We didn't really mean that because I'm wondering if they changed course yesterday because there has been backlash, because there has been a lot of focus on Elon Musk and who is he and why is he there? And I noticed there's a little bit of color from the hill. I noticed when there were people who had gathered to listen to the House Democrats on the east side of the hill, they had signs that said things about Elon Musk more so than they had signs about Trump, which means...
There's a lot of backlash about this man. There was one huge banner where a man had said we did not elect Elon Musk. And I've been, you know, on the hills, a lot of protesting, a lot of signs. And it was so interesting to see that most of the focus was this backlash toward Elon Musk. So if that continues, our Republicans, will Trump decide to put some distance between themselves? The backlash is real. There are two data points that haven't gotten a lot of attention, but I think are really significant. The first is at least 21 members of the U.S. Doge service, which is it was this U.S. digital service that was created under Obama on day one. Trump signed this executive order, making it Doge.
21 career members of the doge service are planning to resign over what musk is doing uh one of them told one of our colleagues that they felt like they've become an enabler that they were building all these databases uh and it's it's a pretty dramatic move the other big thing that's causing chaos very rarely if a government lawyer makes a false claim in court it's a big deal if you tell a judge something that's wrong you have to go to the court and basically submit a paper to say i was wrong correction the way we do in the newspaper uh the justice department has had to correct more than 20 false claims made in court, almost all of them related to Doge and who had access to what and who had power. And so, you know, who had, uh, you know, the person at the treasury department who had access to the treasury payments database, was he an employee of the treasury department or was he a special government employee who was detailed those kinds of things, but that do become legally significant. And so the justice department lawyers are saying things in court that are advantageous to their argument. And then they realized they were wrong and they have to go.
clear it up to avoid sanctions by the court. And part of what's happening in terms of the backlash is the civil division at the Justice Department is what defends the government when it's sued. And even before Trump took over, a bunch of longtime lawyers in the civil division had resigned. And since Trump's taken over, even more people have left. And these lawyers don't have to go make, in their view, outrageous legal arguments. So they're just leading with their feet. And so that means that there's this huge workload. They've obviously tried to break so much stuff. And so there's so many lawsuits. And so the government is stretched really thin.
best lawyers aren't the ones in court. And so they keep making these mistakes. And it is pissing off judges, including some appointed by Trump, who are angry that they're being given false information. When a federal prosecutor tells you something, you want to be able to take it to the bank. And it really underscores the fragmentation, the dysfunction, but also the backlash.
This is Sidebar from the Washington Post. A reminder, you can watch us on YouTube if you'd like to follow along there, or of course, you can always listen to us on your favorite podcast app. Okay, so you talked about how Cash Patel, you can't get more loyal to Donald Trump than Cash Patel had to send out an email to the FBI saying, please don't respond to the Elon Musk request. Other heads of departments had to scramble to say, just don't, you know, slow your roll, ignore this. If there's this pushback and frustration, and as Rhonda said, politically, it's easier, it seems like right now, more palatable to direct it at Musk, this unelected official. Does that show any daylight then between...
like are Republicans getting frustrated with Elon Musk at this point? And are they willing to talk about it, James? Yes, they're frustrated. No, they're not quite willing to talk about it. Some are, we'll get into that in a second, but White House staff are annoyed at Elon Musk creating headaches. You know, there's only supposed to be one person who can like mess up your day by saying something on social media. Not this other guy. And so the White House officials are frustrated with him. A lot of these departments, these agencies are trying to do a lot of very complicated stuff. They're trying to assess their own workforce. And honestly, we're seeing institutions sort of come into...
play come into motion. This is what institutions do. When you're Kash Patel, all of a sudden you oversee more than 10,000 people in the FBI, you want to be the one making decisions about your people and who's good and who's bad, not a bunch of 20 something. people who have no law enforcement experience that are working with Elon Musk. And so I do think some of this is what institutions are supposed to do. And it's very natural. The person who comes in saying they want to get rid of the agency, as soon as they take over the agency, they realize this agency might be worth saving. Especially if I'm running it. So I do want to play something from your neck of the woods, Run to the Hill. This is Senator Curtis, Republican of Utah. He was on one of the Sunday shows this weekend, Face the Nation, and they're talking about the Doge efforts. They're also talking about the firing of federal workers. And a reminder, federal workers, 80% of them live outside the Washington, Virginia, Maryland, Beltway region. So they are all across America.
including in Utah. Let's hear what he had to say. If I could say one thing to Elon Musk, it's like, please put a dose of compassion in this. These are real people. These are real lives. These are mortgages. It's a false narrative to say we have to cut and you have to be cruel to do it as well. We can do both. Rhonda, we are hearing a little bit of rumbling from Republicans, but it's like, do it, like downsize the government, waste, fraud, and abuse, but maybe do it a little differently and also protect my turf, protect my funding, protect my people back home. Yeah. Senator Curtis sounds like a lot of Republicans who have been, you know, somewhat outspoken about what's going on with Doge by saying like,
Yeah, he needs to be more thoughtful in these emails and consider that these are real people. But if you look at that entire interview, he also says, you know, people should have to answer for what they're doing in their job and that Donald Trump was elected by people who wanted him to shake things up. So they're kind of saying both things at the same time, I would say. For folks who are wondering, why isn't Elon Musk just going home? Who is he? Is he the dinner guest that just won't leave? The one thing you have to remember about Republicans, specifically House Republicans, is Elon Musk bankrolled a lot of their campaigns in the last election. He fundraised and provided a lot of funds for the House to potentially have that Republican majority, especially in those frontline races where you had Republicans who are in very competitive districts. He was able to give them money. So when you think about.
where their political calculations are right now, they're also realizing they're going up against the world's richest man. Now that's, you know, of course, not an excuse for them to choose what policies or things they decided to support, but it is something that is probably running in the background of their mind. And we also know that when he has asked them to shut down the government, remember in December, he did an ex post about that. He threatened to primary some of those Republicans who went against Trump. So there was this overhanging threat that they're kind of trying to thread a needle through right now. So that's just something for folks to keep in mind is why are they having an allegiance to someone who is not an elected official? Yeah, it's a great point. It comes with a lot of power. I do want to note Senator Lisa Murkowski.
Republican from Alaska, who mostly voted on Trump's confirmation, you know, folks, she only bucked a couple of them. She has been speaking out and saying that these mass firings that have been happening. lacked respect and dignity. I'm looking at my notes to quote that. And then she has called on other members of Congress to stand with her in not ceding the power of the Senate. So she's trying to talk about how this is our job, right? This is our house and Senate. We're the ones who get to decide where the money goes. The question is, James, will others stand with her in that? I think a lot of people are in that hope yes, vote no kind of mentality where Lisa Murkowski is an institutionalist. Her father served in the Senate and she wants to.
protect the institutional prerogative of the legislative branch. She's also very aware that Alaska, like many red states, has a lot of federal workers, and then the web of federal dollars runs really deep. I mean, there is a lot of potential for dominoes to fall in many of these red states if you pull out the federal dollars and take away things from universities and research centers and things like that. Yeah, remember, I'm watching closely on the House side, because again, such a small margin of error, is Congressman Richard McCormick from... Georgia, his district goes right up to the CDC headquarters. And he has been out there the last couple days saying, you know, basically everything we've been talking about, you know, quote, concern that maybe we're moving a little bit too fast. And he said he's going to raise the issue with Trump and Musk. And it is one of those things where a lot of his constituents are in these white collar, well paying.
very important government jobs, uh, because they are all over the country, but he's someone who's never crossed Republican leadership before. And so is that the extent of his objection sort of like, well, we need to do this more carefully, or is he going to actually, you know, use his considerable leverage because Republicans have such a small majority to say, no, we're not going to cut the CDC and I'm not going to vote for anything that does, you know, to the question of what people come along with Murkowski, it's when the rubber meets the road, will they actually. vote against the guy who does bankroll Republican campaigns and the president who's so popular. So we've talked about minor fissures, tension, maybe more likely the better word publicly between Republicans and Musk, less so between Republicans and Trump. What about between Trump and Musk? Because that's been a place where people have been hoping to like people who do not like what is happening, you know, find some kind of a crack, like a power struggle between them. James? I think Trump has sort of tried.
to avoid being one-upped by Elon Musk. I think there's a very strong desire in the White House to not allow there to be any public daylight between them. That's why they did a joint interview together with Sean Hannity last week. And I think that there certainly is some tension, but so far Trump has resisted doing the things Trump normally does. Well, it's like taking the bait, right? The people who do want them to fracture. So let's listen to how Donald Trump talked about this email that roiled so many federal workers and people who represent them.
You know, I think it was actually, there was a lot of genius in sending it. We're trying to find out if people are working. And so we're sending a letter to people, please tell us what you did last week. If people don't respond, it's very possible that there is no such person or they're not working. So that's Donald Trump trying to show no daylight between him and Musk. You know, James, a little earlier in the broadcast, you talked about chaos that's happening. I really feel like we've got to pause for a moment and talk about what's happening at the highest levels of the military. Can you detail us?
who has been kicked out of their jobs and removed and the significance of that. Trump has been taking these aggressive steps on Friday night in hopes that it sort of gets lost. But the military has never seen a purge quite like this. Trump got rid of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Charles Q. Brown Jr., the chief of naval operations, the Air Force's vice chairman, and the top military lawyers for the Army, Navy, and Air Force, really wanting to install his own people who aren't going to challenge him. And I think that the...
danger of that is that you really historically rely on the Joint Chiefs to give you candid, honest military advice. And clearly the lesson is if you're perceived as too woke or too insufficiently loyal to Donald Trump, then you're out and people will act accordingly. And that becomes really risky when there's a serious national security threat. It does. And the person he is replacing in that role of chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he does not. I looked up U.S. code yesterday where it stipulates what.
type of resume you need. He does not have the three areas of experience that would typically be in that role. But it does also, the law also says that the president can place a member in there if it is in the national interest. So I guess that's where Trump is going with that. But it is really stunning. And again, it happened on a Friday night. Many people may have missed it, but to know that the very, very, very top brass of the military had a shakeup, it's really incredible and something to keep an eye on. There's something dangerous happening here too, though, because Pete Hegseth had specifically criticized one of the folks who was fired, General Brown, for being like a DEI type, woke type individual.
He's African-American. Quite a few people purged are women. And so are they being criticized for having DEI connections because of what they've done and said or because of what they are, which is like. firing and hiring someone based on the color of their skin or their gender or sex is a can of worms, James. Pete Hegseth in his book that came out last year had a chapter that said DEI means die. And I think you could make a valid point that that was the motivation for some of these decisions. And it does have a chilling effect on the military, on recruitment and diversity. And I think that this is one of those things will, this is also happening as the Pentagon is firing last this week, I guess, 5,400 civilian personnel. They say they want to cut the staff by 8%. This is 900,000 civilian employees in the Pentagon. So they're really dramatically overhauling.
military. We'll leave it there for today, but we do want to share with our audience that we have some special programming coming up. Next Tuesday is President Trump's joint address to Congress. It is like, for you nerds, a State of the Union, except right after the election, it's not called a State of the Union because that's what a president does. After having been in office for a year, picture them riding their horse and carriage down to the Capitol and delivering the address of how the year has gone. So this is just called a joint address. And just like a State of the Union, everybody will be there. All the members of Congress, Republicans, Democrats, Cabinet, Secretary, Supreme Court, Justices, and we will be watching with you. Here's the news you can watch along with us. We, the Washington Post here on our sidebar team, James, Rhonda,
And we'll be kind of dissecting the president's speech in real time and chatting about what it all amounts to. So I'm really looking forward to that. The speech itself starts at nine o'clock Eastern time. We begin at eight o'clock Eastern time. Come watch, hang out with us, and we'll talk to you on Tuesday, March 4th. See you then.
When it comes to the big questions, who you ask matters. From breaking news to politics that impact your life to advice you can trust. Get answers you don't have to question with Ask the Post AI. Trained exclusively on post journalism with clear sourcing. And if we don't know the answer, we'll tell you. Ask the Post AI. Find it on WashingtonPost.com or in the app.