Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) on Tuesday urged Elon Musk and his team at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to treat federal workers respectfully as they look to cut wasteful programs and improve efficiency in government.
While Thune said he supports the effort to shrink the federal bureaucracy and overhaul programs that have grown steadily larger and more complex over the last several decades, Thune advised Musk to keep in mind the human element of cutting jobs and funding.
“I think that any process you undergo where you’re trying to find efficiencies, if that involves reductions in force, it needs to be done in a respectful way, obviously respectful of the people involved,” he told reporters.
He said Musk’s mission is “to try and figure out ways to make government run more efficiently, more effectively and reduce its cost” to make sure “the American taxpayer is getting a good deal.”
“We want to do everything we can — and I think this has been long overdue — to try to figure out how we can make government work more efficiently, cost the taxpayers less and make sure they get a good return on the taxpayer dollars that they spend in this country,” he added. “But I would also argue, again, anything that they do they need to be respectful of the people that are involved in these agencies and departments of government.”
Thune suggested that Musk could defer decisions about reductions in the federal workforce to members of President Trump’s Cabinet, who are directly in charge of various departments and agencies.
“That’s why we worked so hard to get these folks confirmed. They’re now in position to make those decisions and I think some of them already asserted that right to make those decisions,” Thune said, noting that some Trump-appointed agency officials have pushed back on Musk’s demand that federal workers submit email summaries of their accomplishments for the week.
Other Republicans have voiced concerns about Musk’s aggressive demands that federal workers justify their jobs by submitting lists of accomplishments or else resign.
Sen. John Curtis (R-Utah) on Sunday called on Musk to treat federal workers facing job loss with “compassion”
“If I can say one thing to Elon Musk, it’s like, ‘Please put a dose of compassion in this. These are real people. [These] are real lives. These are mortgages,” he said on CBS News’s “Face the Nation.”
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) over the weekend criticized Musk over what she called his “absurd” demand that federal workers justify their continued employment by submitting bullet points in an email.
“Our public workforce deserves to be treated with dignity and respect for the unheralded jobs they perform,” she wrote on the social media platform X. “The absurd weekend email to justify their existence wasn’t it.”
