Elon Musk defends DOGE productivity email to federal employees: ‘Do you have a pulse?’

President Donald Trump tapped Elon Musk to speak at the top of the first full Cabinet meeting on Wednesday to discuss the progress made by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Musk, standing in his signature black suit jacket with a T-shirt underneath, spoke at the meeting in which the media was present and made some clarifications about what he and DOGE are doing, as well as a recent email sent to government employees.

“I actually just call myself a humble tech support hero,” Musk stated. “As crazy as it sounds, that is almost a literal description of the work of the DOGE team is doing is helping fix the government computer systems,” he said, saying the computer systems are “extremely old” and there are many mistakes in the systems.

“So we are actually tech support,” Musk said. “It’s ironic, but it’s true.”

He also defended last week’s productivity email to federal employees. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday in a press briefing that more than 1 million federal workers participated in the Musk and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) directive to provide a bullet-point list of their work accomplishments from the previous week.

“I think that email was perhaps interpreted as a performance review, but actually it was a pulse check review. Do you have a pulse?” Musk said. “And if you have a pulse and two neurons, you could reply to an email.”

Musk said the task was “not a high bar” and should be something “anyone could accomplish.”

“But what we are trying to get to the bottom of is we think there are a number of people on the government payroll who are dead, which is probably why they can’t respond,” he said. “And some people who are not real people… like they’re fictional individuals that are collecting a paycheck… well, somebody is collecting paychecks on a fictional individual, so we’re just literally trying to figure out are these people real, are they alive, and can they write email, which I think is a reasonable expectation.”

Musk explained that “our goal is not to be capricious or unfair” in how DOGE operates, and that the “overall goal here with the DOGE team is to help address the enormous deficit