Some cabinet officials are showing a glimmer of willingness to check the billionaire’s power.
They have laid off their own workers. They have reshuffled their departments’ priorities. They have taken aim at D.E.I.
But, after weeks of walking in lock step with the White House, some cabinet officials and other high-level Trump appointees have balked at a directive from Elon Musk.
The episode — which began on Saturday with a demand by Musk, posted on X, that federal employees either sum up a week’s worth of their accomplishments by email or resign — morphed into a rare display of defiance in the highest ranks of the administration. And it became something of an effort to rein in Musk’s power in real time.
Senior officials at the State Department, the F.B.I., the Energy Department and other agencies told their employees to hold off on responding to Musk’s message. Some of the agencies refusing to comply are run by close Trump allies like Kash Patel, Tulsi Gabbard and Pam Bondi.
Those officials didn’t specifically confront Musk. A note that went to some employees at the Justice Department said they should ignore the request “due to the confidential and sensitive nature of the department’s work,” according to an email obtained by my colleague Cecilia Kang.
And the spat over an email is far less intense than the dissent from some rank-and-file workers that my colleagues Nicholas Nehamas, Ryan Mac and Nikole Hannah-Jones covered over the weekend.