President Donald Trump’s signature — in thick, black Sharpie ink — was just a formality.
Hours after he signed an executive order Tuesday requiring federal agencies to work with the Elon Musk-led DOGE Service to cut their current workforce and limit future hiring, the termination notices started hitting the in-boxes of a few hundred probationary employees at the Small Business Administration.
Those same employees had actually first received emails on Friday evening informing them they were being let go, according to two people familiar with the situation. Supervisors, the people said, had not been notified and scrambled to get clarity about the situation.
It wasn’t until Monday afternoon that SBA officials clarified that the termination notices were a mistake. In an email, those who’d received the unsigned draft letter were informed that it was “sent in error … [and] not currently in effect. That explanation was hardly reassuring for SBA employees who remained in limbo.
On Tuesday, shortly after Trump signed the executive order giving Musk’s DOGE outfit even more authority and reach than it already had, the same people got the email again. This time it was real. And whereas the draft they received on Friday specified that their terminations would take effect on Feb. 21, the new email stated that their jobs were being ended immediately.
“They seemingly jerked people around like this for the sake of EO choreography,” one of the people familiar said.
A DOGE spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Hours earlier, Musk, the force behind much of the current government downsizing, held forth in the Oval Office, standing with his young son beside the Resolute Desk where Trump signed the order and taking questions from reporters. But neither the billionaire tech CEO nor the president could offer specifics to back up their claims that DOGE had, as Trump put it, uncovered “billions and billions of dollars in waste, fraud and abuse.”
Musk, confronted over his false claims on X about $500 million in aid spent on condoms for people in Gaza, acknowledged that “some of the things I say will be incorrect and should be corrected.”
But he held fast to the assertion that there is public support for his efforts.
“If the bureaucracy is in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have?” Musk said. “It does not match the will of the people, so it’s just something we’ve got to fix.”
Everett Kelley, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees, issued a statement blasting Trump’s executive order and the ongoing reduction of the federal workforce.
“Firing huge numbers of federal employees won’t decrease the need for government services,” Kelly said. “It will just make those services harder or impossible to access for everyday Americans, veterans, and seniors who depend on them.”
