President Donald Trump’s new HR czar has already started firing potshots at former “first buddy” Elon Musk, questioning the effectiveness of his work at cost-cutting task force DOGE.
Scott Kupor, a longtime managing partner at megabucks venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, was sworn in as director of the Office of Personnel Management on July 14. Speaking at OPM’s headquarters, which at one point served as the unofficial nerve center for Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, Kupor first distanced himself from the Tesla CEO, then hit him with a flurry of thinly veiled digs.
“I have zero personal relationship with Elon Musk. I have talked to Elon Musk once on the phone in my life,” Kupor told reporters on Monday.
He then asserted he would deliver on Trump’s agenda, adding, in the first punch directed squarely at Musk’s gut: “But I’m not going to do it consistent with someone else’s objectives that are inconsistent with what the president wants to do.”
He specifically targeted a Musk-era directive. In a bid to force accountability, the DOGE chief announced in late February that all federal staff must list what they had “accomplished” in their work week.
“Please reply to this email with approximately 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager. Deadline is this Monday at 11:59 pm EST,” the email, sent to all federal staff, read.
Simultaneously, Musk posted on X: “Consistent with President @realDonaldTrump’s instructions... Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”
The ploy reportedly caught the White House off guard. Two Trump loyalists were installed at OPM as a result, Reuters reported in March.
Speaking on Monday, Kupor described the “5 things” process as “very manual” and “not efficient.” He said the initiative was “something that we should look at and see, like, are we getting the value out of it that at least the people who put it in place thought they were?”
Congress last week passed a $9 billion rescission package cutting foreign aid and funding for public broadcasters, which was portrayed as the fruit of DOGE’s work.
Critics were quick to point out that the $9 billion is just a drop in the bucket in federal funding terms, about half a day’s expenditure for the government. One likened it to “trying to build a house by collecting pennies.”
In an official press release after he was confirmed last week, OPM said Kupor would “lead the Trump Administration’s efforts to build a high-performing, accountable, and mission-driven workforce that upholds the trust of every American taxpayer.”
The aims of his OPM aren’t a million miles away from what Musk had wished for DOGE, but Kupor has tried to distance himself from the scorched-earth language used by the billionaire.
Even still, one of Kupor’s first salvos will be to oversee the cull of about one-third of his agency’s staff by the end of the year. Most of the more than 1,000 exits will be voluntary.
They will come through deferred resignations, early retirements, or other forms of buyouts, the agency said.
“If I get run out of town because people don’t like what I’m doing, I’m OK with that,” Kupor said Monday. “I’m here because I really think it’s important... I really do believe that we’re on an unsustainable fiscal path.”
However, Kupor warned that cuts alone would not fix the national debt.
“We’re not going to solve [the deficit] by just literally zeroing out discretionary spend,” he said.
DOGE, meanwhile, has been beset by staff departures, legal headaches, and bureaucratic obstacles since its billionaire figurehead lost his status as a “special government employee” and began attacking Trump on his social media platform X.
