WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump defended the efforts of billionaire adviser Elon Musk to force federal workers to justify their roles and productivity or be fired, casting it as a legitimate bid to root out fraud and waste in the U.S. government.

“I thought it was great, because we have people that don’t show up to work, and nobody even knows that they work for the government,” Trump said Monday at a meeting with visiting French President Emmanuel Macron. “There was a lot of genius in sending it.”

Trump did not provide any evidence for his claims about federal workers being truant from their jobs or lacking oversight from agency managers.

The president’s remarks followed a chaotic weekend in which Trump urged Musk, who heads the Department of Government Efficiency, known commonly as DOGE, to be “more aggressive” in cutting costs. Musk responded by having the Office of Personnel Management send an email to more than two million federal workers asking them to submit five bullet points explaining what they accomplished in their jobs over the last week.

The directive, however, quickly met resistance across several agencies where Trump-appointed and Senate-confirmed officials are now in place. The departments of Defense, State and Homeland Security all told workers to disregard the email or wait for further instructions, as did the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Department of Homeland Security told employees it would reply to OPM on their behalf.

Trump downplayed the disconnect, saying that agencies were simply concerned about “confidential things” being revealed in the emails, rather than pushing back on the broader accountability effort. The email to employees warned not to include classified information in their response.

Musk’s increasingly drastic efforts to put pressure on the federal workforce as part of DOGE’s broad push to scale back the size of the U.S. government have drawn protests from employee unions, Democrats in Congress and even constituents in Republican-leaning districts. But the productivity report mandate marked the first significant pushback from within the ranks of Trump allies running the government.

Musk, who was the largest donor to efforts to elect Trump last year, has demonstrated he wields considerable access to the Oval Office in the president’s first month. In shielding Musk’s work from legal challenges, the government has said he’s only an adviser with no direct authority.

Still, Musk’s hand has been evident. An earlier email asking employees to volunteer for a deferred resignation program had the subject “A Fork in the Road” — the same metaphor Musk used to downsize at Twitter, the social media site he has since rebranded as X. The subject of the weekend email was “What did you do last week?” — a frequent question he asks to executives at his private companies.

Musk has also threatened federal employees with suspension if they don’t return to the office this week after four years of COVID-era work-from home policies.

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