One of the latest DOGE initiatives launched by Elon Musk was immediately shut down by Donald Trump’s own appointees, but the billionaire entrepreneur-turned-politician is already scrambling to avoid humiliation by claiming that the entire operation was a ruse to gauge the federal agencies’ reaction. The way Musk and Trump are going about pushing the agendas of this burgeoning administration eerily reminds one of a drunken orchestra, with each musician playing their own tune with no rhyme or reason, and no conductor in sight to give it all a sense of order. For instance, it was only a few days ago when we heard the president was pushing Musk to be more aggressive with his Department of Government Efficiency, and to his credit, he did comply, coming up with a new ingenious plan to disrupt the workflow of federal agencies and play a little game of email correspondence with them, only to be immediately shut down by some of Trump’s own appointees, including the new FBI director Kash Patel. The MAGA camp was beginning to turn on itself anyway. And sometimes, all it takes, as has been proven time and again with greedy populists only out to get more power and influence, is one rotten apple. Even Trump is not sure where he stands with his biggest benefactor, and we’ve seen rumors that the man is not entirely pleased with those President Musk jokes. As for the Tesla CEO himself, one day you find him trying to backtrack from his own rules regarding freedom of speech, and the next grasping at straws to save face among his MAGA friends. Elon directed his DOGE henchmen to send emails from the Office of Personnel Management, asking federal employees to list all the things they accomplished last week. Elon also made it clear that failure to respond would be “taken as registration.” With less than 24 hours before the deadline, however, he changed his words and claimed that the whole operation was a “pulse check” to measure if, uh, they’d respond to him? By Monday morning, many of the targeted bureaus had been advised by their directors to ignore the email, and some of these responses must have touched a nerve because Elon is now outright using threatening language to bring these federal organizations to heel. “This was basically a check to see if the employee had a pulse and was capable of replying to an email,” He said. “This mess will get sorted out this week. Lot of people in for a rude awakening and strong dose of reality. They don’t get it yet, but they will.” Now regardless of what percentage of employees actually responded to this email and listed all the things they did last week to determine whether their job is essential, it was being reported that the emails would ultimately be fed into an LLM (Large Language Model) which is an advanced AI system, after concerns that DOGE would not be able to review every email directly. But now that Elon himself is dismissing this as just a “pulse check,” those plans may no longer be in motion.