Jon Stewart blasted Elon Musk’s “ideologically antagonistic” approach to making government more efficient, saying the billionaire’s cost-cutting task force DOGE was unfairly treating federal employees like the “enemy.”
As the head of President Donald Trump’s “department” of government efficiency, Musk and a team of acolytes with no government experience have spent the last month canceling hundreds of millions of dollars in government contracts, shuttering federal agencies and accessing millions of Americans’ private data.
They’ve also set out to purge the civil service by forcing mass resignations and firings.
“They are viewing those people immediately through the prism of a parasitic relationship to our money. And viewing them immediately as enemies and suspicious,” Stewart said during Thursday’s episode of his podcast The Weekly Show.
The comedian added that he was absolutely in favor of making government more efficient, but he didn’t think that’s what Musk and his minions were accomplishing.
On Saturday, the Office of Personnel Management sent an email to millions of employees telling them to reply with “approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week” and to copy their managers. That same day, Musk announced on his social media platform X that failure to respond would be taken as resignation.
The result was widespread chaos, as some departments said it was mandatory for employees to respond, some said it was optional, and some advised their employees to ignore the message completely.
Discussing the email, Stewart said it’s reasonable to expect employees to report their activities to their managers—but not for someone from outside the department to go around demanding to know, “What have you been doing?”
Even if employees answer an email like that, “They tell you, [but] you don’t know if that’s what they’re supposed to be doing or not. Meanwhile, they have to spend all this f---ing time figuring it out, which is inefficient,” Stewart pointed out.
“Honestly, it feels like he’s never not been president,” he said. “Presidency is supposed to age the president, not the people. I am withering.”
