Alina Habba savages federal workers for not answering Elon Musk’s DOGE email in brutal White House takedown

Alina Habba is the latest administration official to completely savage federal workers complaining they shouldn’t have to justify their work to Elon Musk.

She’s pushing back on the menial task Musk’s DOGE demanded government employees do by sending five bullet points of what they ‘accomplished’ at work last week.

Habba, 40, tore into workers who didn’t respond to the message, saying it was an easy task they should be able to complete in seconds.

‘It’s very simple, would you want to pay somebody to do a job and they don’t show up to work?’ Habba questioned when speaking with reporters outside the White House on Tuesday.

‘I can name 5 things – 5 bullets – in about 5 minutes of me coming into the office every day,’ Habba said. ‘If you struggle to do that for a week, there’s no excuse for that.’

‘Now, you can have an extra day to answer it, but you better be able to answer it,’ she added, referring to some confusion over the timeline for when government staff were required to explain what they did at work.

It appears there are a mixture of reasons why workers didn’t respond to the email.

One is that there was conflicting guidance on whether they were allowed to reply to the message coming from the HR department at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).

Some agency bosses told their workers not to answer and said they would issue responses on behalf of their respective departments. This led to a lot of confusion from workers who wondered whether to listen to Musk or their boss.

Habba was sympathetic to that point.

‘I think that there’s reasoning behind that,’ she noted on Tuesday. ‘You have to understand some of these departments – obviously, we work with top secret information that perhaps you’re not supposed to disclose.’

‘There’s a lot of complications I’m not going to get into,’ she said regarding the fact that some top officials are telling their employees not to answer the email.

But she also insisted that it was important for people to listen to whatever President Donald Trump is directing.

‘There’s one person we’re supposed to be listening to and that’s President Trump and what the American people mandated, which is what we’re doing,’ she said.

Musk had the OPM email go out on Saturday night and gave workers a 11:59 p.m. deadline on Monday to reply.

Many were annoyed that they didn’t have adequate time to reply – claiming there are people on leave or without access to their work emails during that time.

It got even more dire when Musk posted to X on Saturday that if the 2.3 million workers who received the email did not respond by the deadline, it would be taken as a resignation.

Some workers have complained they are understaffed and don’t have time to respond to DOGE after Musk gutted their agencies and cut billions in contracts for private workers to take off the load on the federal workforce.

This is what the White House and many Republicans take particular issue with.

‘People need to be accountable, you need to be able to answer the question,’ Habba demanded. ‘The reality of it is: accountability is real.’

‘I can’t not show up to work every day,’ she said. ‘I have to answer to the president, and by answering to the president I answer to the American people.’

If people are still confused, Habba said: ‘I’m not sure why you’re confused or why it’s so hard to answer what five things you’ve done in the past week.’

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said during her briefing on Tuesday that she sent back an email to OPM and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Taylor Budowichwith some of the work she completed last week.

This included holding a press briefing, delivering a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and staffing Trump’s speech there and going on Fox News for interviews.

She noted that the email took her just two minutes to draft.