Federal Employees Targeted By Elon Musk Face Barrage of Harassment

Elon Musk has taken to posting the identities of relatively unknown government officials and federal workers whose jobs he wants to eliminate, and his followers are taking it upon themselves to harass and threaten those they can find. 

Following a series of posts from Musk earlier this week highlighting the names and titles of federal workers whose jobs he called “fake,” the targets of his social media activity are facing a barrage of online abuse, according to a report from CNN on Wednesday. Many of the employees highlighted by Musk do not have public-facing jobs, and have done nothing other than hold a title that displeases the billionaire who’s anointed himself Donald Trump’s co-president and is expected to help the president-elect slash government bureaucracy. 

CNN’s review of Musk’s prolific posting habits found that over the course of the last week, the billionaire boosted posts on his website revealing the names and job titles of four federal employees working in climate policy and regulation. The four targets were all women, and Musk — who owns the electric vehicle company Tesla — has a vested interest in climate policy.

In one instance, Musk quote-tweeted a post highlighting the role of a woman who works as a “Director of Climate Diversification” at the U.S. International Development Finance Corp. (DFC), a relatively obscure government agency. “So many fake jobs,” Musk captioned his repost. 

A self-styled “anti-woke” crusader, Musk likely took the word “diversification” to mean the “D” in “DEI.” A spokesperson for the DFC told The Wall St. Journal earlier this week that the employee — who holds degrees in engineering, business, and water science from Oxford and MIT — serves a highly technical role focused on identifying innovative solutions to help protect American agriculture and infrastructure from the effects of natural disasters.  

CNN’s investigation found that the employee had shut down several of her social media accounts following Musk’s tweet. 

In another repost — highlighting a tweet from the same account that targeted the DFC employee — Musk mocked  former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s niece, who works as a  senior adviser to climate change at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. 

“Nancy Pelosi’s niece should not be paid $181,648.00 by the U.S. Taxpayer to be the “Climate Advisor” at HUD,” the original account wrote. 

“But maybe her advice is amazing 🤣🤣” Musk commented. 

The post included the names and titles of two other employees: the Department of Energy’s chief climate officer in its loan programs office — a program that in 2010 awarded Tesla a $465 million investment — and the name of an employee serving as Senior Advisor on Environmental Justice and Climate Change at the Department of Health and Human Services. 

The posts give a window into the type of roles Musk plans to target as the co-director of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — an unofficial department created specifically to house Musk’s promise to gut the federal bureaucracy and purge government agencies of what he considers superfluous employees. 

DOGE has no inherent power, and has not been sanctioned as an official department by Congress — but according to recent reporting Musk and his co-director, failed presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy — have been in talks with members of the Trump transition and MAGA Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) to form a congressional subcommittee tasked with converting DOGE’s recommendations into concrete legislation. 

Missy Cummings, a former fighter pilot and senior advisor at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, was targeted in 2021 by Musk, who claimed she “is extremely biased against Tesla.” Tesla has faced repeated scrutiny from NHTSA, dating back to at least 2021, and has been forced to issue recalls over its supposed “Full-Self Driving” and Autopilot programs.

Cummings told CNN that as a result of the attention from Musk and other prominent accounts affiliated with him, she had received death threats, was forced to temporarily leave her home, and deleted her X account. 

She added that the climate of intimidation is already leading some longtime federal employees to leave their jobs. “He intended for them, for people just like this, to be intimidated and just go ahead and quit so he didn’t have to fire them. So his plan, to some extent, is working,” she said.