On Friday afternoon, the world’s richest person showed up at what sounds like one of the world’s most boring agencies to demand a list.
Elon Musk had arrived at the Office of Personnel Management, a mundane-sounding agency with vast power overseeing the federal civilian work force. During President Trump’s first term, the nation’s leader used the agency to enforce loyalty to his agenda. During his second term, it appears Mr. Musk may try to use the office to enforce loyalty to his own agenda.
Mr. Musk has stormed into Washington with a host of friends and paid employees, determined to leave his imprint quickly. Never before in modern times has someone so rich played such a hands-on role in American government, with Mr. Musk making himself omnipresent in Washington since flying there for Mr. Trump’s inauguration. His plane has not left.
On Mr. Trump’s first day, he empowered Mr. Musk by establishing the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, a cost-cutting effort that the tech billionaire is leading. Mr. Trump gave the group the authority to work on a plan to reduce the size of the federal work force, among other things.
Taking to Washington with his trademark single-mindedness and bravado, Mr. Musk is reprising the tactics he deployed at Twitter, which he bought in 2022. He has brought to bear the full weight of his Silicon Valley network, installing some of the same executives who cut 80 percent of the social network’s staff, and even using the same email subject lines. He has promised “mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy,” and is now racing to do just that.
Mr. Musk’s slash-first, fix-later approach to cost-cutting has been intentional throughout his career. And some of the early moves by the Trump administration to freeze funding for federal programs and entice federal workers to resign have led to mass confusion or are being legally challenged.
But Mr. Musk wants to see radical change — and he is pressing forward.
This article is based on interviews with a dozen people briefed on how Mr. Musk has spent his first week in Washington, all of whom insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about his activities.
Musk allies to oversee the work force
On Friday, Mr. Musk showed up at the Theodore Roosevelt Federal Building and asked Office of Personnel Management staff to produce a list of the federal chief information officers. The request reflected how Mr. Musk’s plans seem to heavily involve the agency, which is set to be run by a supporter of his, Scott Kupor, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist at Andreessen Horowitz who is awaiting Senate confirmation.
Mr. Musk, however, is wasting no time before Mr. Kupor’s arrival.
Several of Mr. Musk’s top aides have landed senior adviser roles at the Office of Personnel Management. They include Brian Bjelde, a human resources executive at SpaceX who has identified himself as the company’s 14th employee and who played a role in Mr. Musk’s takeover of Twitter, where he helped carry out widespread layoffs. Another arrival is Riccardo Biasini, an executive at the Boring Company, Mr. Musk’s tunneling company, who also joined Mr. Musk’s team at Twitter.
But the most empowered of Mr. Musk’s allies at the Office of Personnel Management has been Anthony Armstrong, a top technology banker at Morgan Stanley who worked on the billionaire’s acquisition of Twitter in 2022.
Mr. Musk appears to have even taken over internal communications. On Tuesday evening, an email from the Office of Personnel Management offered about two million federal employees the option to resign, and to be paid through the end of September, with the subject line: “Fork in the road.” That was exactly the subject line that Mr. Musk used to encourage Twitter employees to resign in November 2022.
Most of the people whom Mr. Musk has brought to Washington are young engineers who did not know him but have signed up for 80-hour workweeks and are being deployed at federal agencies.
But he does not readily trust new people, and so he is calling largely on his inner circle.
Confidants in his vast war on the bureaucracy include the investor Antonio Gracias, a former board member of Tesla, and Terrence O’Shaughnessy, a retired four-star Air Force general who is one of Mr. Musk’s top advisers at SpaceX. Mr. Musk has pushed Mr. O’Shaughnessy for administration positions, and the general told others he was being considered as a possible replacement for Pete Hegseth during Mr. Hegseth’s turbulent but successful bid to lead the Pentagon.
One new person to have gained Mr. Musk’s trust is Baris Akis, a Turkish-born leader of a Silicon Valley venture firm who graduated from Stanford in 2016.
Mr. Akis had no meaningful relationship with Mr. Musk until just a few weeks ago. But he was deeply involved in Mr. Trump’s transition — perhaps putting in more hours than any other tech leader beyond Mr. Musk — and he has emerged from that effort as a right-hand man to Steve Davis, a Musk lieutenant who has overseen the Department of Government Efficiency.
Mr. Davis and Mr. Akis have been heavily involved in the Office of Personnel Management in recent weeks. But neither of them actually work there. Mr. Davis nowadays spends much of his time detailed to the General Services Administration, which helps manage federal agencies and which is a likely next target of Mr. Musk’s war on the bureaucracy.
At the General Services Administration, Mr. Musk has installed a Tesla software engineer, Thomas Shedd, as its director of “Technology Transformation Services.”
Another Musk ally, Amanda Scales, who previously worked for the billionaire and before that for Mr. Akis, has played a particularly outward-facing role at the Office of Personnel Management. Federal agencies were asked to send Ms. Scales a list of the workers who are still on probationary status — and are therefore easier to fire.
Ms. Scales has been appointed as the agency’s chief of staff at a time when it has no full-time director, and she has faced much anger online as the face of Mr. Trump’s proposed reductions to the federal work force.
Fingerprints on key moves
In Washington, Mr. Musk is both a celebrity and a bureaucrat, sometimes simultaneously.
At one moment, he and several of his billionaire friends, including Mr. Gracias, were mingling with fixtures of the Washington establishment at the annual dinner of the Alfalfa Club, where several attendees broke the event’s unwritten no-phones policy and mobbed him for selfies. At another, he was spotted in the White House mess, where 20-something staff members grab sandwiches between meetings — but unlike Mr. Musk, most do not return to a West Wing office to help oversee what Mr. Trump says is a 40-person team carrying out his executive orders.
Mr. Musk has found himself focused on bureaucratic maneuvers in his first week.
His team has prioritized finding a way to email all 2.3 million federal civilian employees at once, the type of thing that is easy to do at a company like Tesla but more challenging to do across the vast federal work force, in which agencies can typically email only their own employees. The Office of Personnel Management was able to use that list to deliver its Tuesday evening memo.
All of this is in pursuit of what Mr. Musk initially said would be $2 trillion in annual cost savings through the use of technology, deregulation and budget cuts (he has more recently lowered his estimate to closer to $1 trillion). In several posts on X since Mr. Trump’s inauguration, the Department of Government Efficiency has boasted of more than $500 million in immediate savings through the curtailing of D.E.I. initiatives and the renegotiation of unused office leases, which officials called the “initial focus” of the group.
On the first day of the Trump administration, Mr. Musk’s team took over the United States Digital Service, a unit in the president’s executive office that has been renamed the “U.S. DOGE Service.” The service’s roughly 200 employees are expecting substantial layoffs, and a different Silicon Valley executive, Tom Krause, has conducted some interviews of employees. Among other questions, Mr. Krause has asked the employees what makes them exceptional and who the agency’s best workers are.
Mr. Musk’s team has also taken on a range of roles, including I.T. staff members and detectives. Mr. Trump has said that Mr. Musk’s job includes carrying out his executive orders. And so Mr. Musk has tried to deploy his engineers to find ways to turn off the flow of money from the Treasury Department to things that Mr. Trump wants to defund.
Mr. Musk’s allies in the Department of Government Efficiency and the White House say they snuffed out an attempt from some federal employees to rush money out to the World Health Organization just after Mr. Trump said he was withdrawing the country from the global agency. Their claims could not immediately be verified.
And according to at least one Trump aide, Mr. Musk also played a role in the president’s sweeping grant of clemency to the people charged in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
On the evening of the prisoners’ release, Paul Ingrassia, a White House liaison to the Justice Department, claimed to a crowd at a Washington jail that “Elon Musk knew a lot about this and was the mastermind behind it.”
Next to Mr. Ingrassia was an aide to Mr. Musk: Christopher Stanley, who has worked as a security engineer at SpaceX and X and recently relocated to a role “at the White House,” Mr. Ingrassia said. Mr. Stanley has complained on social media about federal employees’ work ethic and speed at returning emails since he arrived in Washington.
Mr. Musk may be something of a super-aide, but he is generally liked by Mr. Trump’s inner circle, texting memes and trading intel with staff members who are worth a minuscule fraction of what he is. He does not find it beneath him: In a conversation with a friend, Mr. Musk seemed almost amazed at his fortune.
Kirsten Grind and Ryan Mac contributed reporting.
