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Some Agencies Urge Staff Not to Comply With Elon Musk’s Performance Email
Several Trump-appointed agency leaders urged federal workers not to comply with Elon Musk’s order to summarize their accomplishments for the past week or be removed from their positions, even as Mr. Musk doubled down on his demand over the weekend.
Their instructions in effect countermanded the order of Mr. Musk across much of the government, challenging the broad authority President Trump has given the world’s richest man to make drastic changes to the federal bureaucracy. The standoff serves as one of the first significant tests of how far Mr. Musk’s power will extend.
As the directive ricocheted across the federal government, officials at some agencies, including the F.B.I., the office coordinating America’s intelligence agencies and the Departments of Defense, State, Energy, Health and Human Services and Homeland Security, told their employees not to respond.
Mr. Musk’s email had even reached the inboxes of sitting federal judges — who are in the judicial branch, not the executive. The administrative office for the federal courts advised judges and staff that “this email did not originate from the judiciary or the administrative office and we suggest that no action be taken.”
The public pushback reflects a growing unease — and, in some cases, alarm — behind the scenes across the Trump administration about the perception of Mr. Musk’s unchecked power.
The unease runs from lower staff to some cabinet secretaries, who have tired of having to justify specific intricacies of agency policy and having to scramble to address unforeseen controversies that Mr. Musk has ignited.
Those officials are aware that he has influence over the president privately, and they fear him using X, the social media website he owns, to single out people he views as obstructing him, according to one senior administration official.
Hours after a senior Defense Department official publicly and firmly pushed back on Mr. Musk’s directive on Sunday afternoon, Mr. Musk singled him out for retribution, saying on X that “anyone with the attitude of that Pentagon official needs to look for a new job.”
One person who was quiet about the controversy throughout much of the weekend was Mr. Trump; after posting on social media on Saturday morning that he wanted Mr. Musk to be more “aggressive,” and then bragging about the purge of federal workers in a speech hours later, the president had remained mute on the subject for much of Sunday.
That afternoon, however, Mr. Trump posted a meme, which he said came from Mr. Musk, mocking federal workers who had to explain their duties and accomplishments, but he did not weigh in on the internal government conflict between his appointees.
Mr. Musk’s public statements about his cost-cutting effort, known as the Department of Government Efficiency, have often expressed an open contempt for the federal work force, which includes some of Mr. Trump’s supporters.
By Sunday afternoon, some of the pushback against Mr. Musk from administration officials — coming in large part from the national security apparatus and law enforcement agencies — had become public and explicit.
“The Department of Defense is responsible for reviewing the performance of its personnel and it will conduct any review in accordance with its own procedures,” Darin S. Selnick, the acting Pentagon official in charge of personnel, said in a statement, instructing Pentagon employees to “for now, please pause any response.”
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of the office of national intelligence, ordered all intelligence community officers not to respond, in a message to intelligence officials reviewed by The New York Times.
“Given the inherently sensitive and classified nature of our work, I.C. employees should not respond to the OPM email,” Ms. Gabbard wrote.
Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, wrote in an email to employees that “the F.B.I., through the office of the director, is in charge of all our review processes,” telling workers that they should “for now, please pause any responses.”
Senior personnel officials at the State and Homeland Security Departments also instructed their employees to not respond to the email.
At the Justice Department and F.B.I., the threatening signals from Mr. Musk were met with a mix of anger and amazement that anyone would issue such a blanket demand without consideration for sensitive areas such as criminal investigations, legal confidentiality or grand jury material.
Some law enforcement supervisors quickly told employees to wait for more guidance from managers on Monday before responding to the demand, according to current and former officials.
Other departments gave conflicting guidance. The Department of Health and Human Services told its employees on Sunday morning to follow the directive. An hour later, an email from the Trump-appointed acting director of the National Institutes of Health, a subordinate agency, told employees to hold off on responding. Hours later, the health department told all employees to “pause” responses to the ultimatum.
On Saturday, Mr. Musk posted a demand for government employees to summarize their accomplishments for the week, warning that failure to do so would be taken as a resignation. Soon after, the Office of Personnel Management, which manages the federal work force, sent an email asking civil servants for a list of accomplishments, but it did not include the threat of removal for not complying.
Unions representing federal workers suggested that Mr. Musk’s order was not valid. They advised their members to follow guidance from their supervisors on how, and whether, to respond to the email.
In a scathing letter on Sunday, Everett B. Kelley, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees — the largest federal employee union — told the acting director of the Office of Personnel Management that the email sent to federal employees was “plainly unlawful” and “thoughtless.”
Mr. Kelley demanded that the order be retracted, and noted, “By allowing the unelected and unhinged Elon Musk to dictate O.P.M.’s actions, you have demonstrated a lack of regard for the integrity of federal employees and their critical work.”
Multiple intelligence agencies, including the National Security Agency, had warned employees that responding could risk inadvertently disclosing classified work.
Although Mr. Musk’s original email told employees not to include classified material, current and former intelligence officials said that if an adversary gained access to thousands of unclassified accounts of intelligence officers’ work that it would be able to piece together sensitive details or learn about projects that were supposed to remain secret.
Representative Mike Lawler, a New York Republican whose seat may be among the most fiercely contested in 2026, raised doubt about the order even as he gave broader support to Mr. Musk’s cost-cutting effort.
“I don’t know how that’s necessarily feasible,” Mr. Lawler said of the ultimatum. “Obviously, a lot of federal employees are under union contract.”
Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, also criticized Mr. Musk’s order.
“Our public workforce deserves to be treated with dignity and respect for the unheralded jobs they perform,” she wrote in a statement on social media. “The absurd weekend email to justify their existence wasn’t it.”
It is unclear what legal basis Mr. Musk would have to justify mass firings based on responses to the email, and the White House and the Office of Personnel Management did not immediately answer questions about the threat of removal.
But Mr. Musk — who made similar unconventional demands during his takeover of Twitter, now known as X — insisted on Sunday morning that the order amounted to “a very basic pulse check.”
In a series of posts, Mr. Musk also promoted baseless claims of wage fraud — that a significant number of “non-existent” or dead people were employed in the federal work force, and that criminals were using the fake employees to collect government paychecks.
“They are covering immense fraud,” Mr. Musk said in response to a post by a supporter that said that “the left is flipping out about a simple email.”
His claims echo a similar one that tens of millions of dead people may be receiving fraudulent Social Security payments. A recent report by the Social Security Administration’s inspector general — a watchdog that investigates the program for waste, fraud and abuse — found that “almost none” of the people in the agency’s database who had likely died were receiving payments.
Reporting was contributed by Julian E. Barnes, Hamed Aleaziz, Apoorva Mandavilli, Devlin Barrett, Rebecca Davis O’Brien, Ken Bensinger, Kate Conger, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Adam Goldman, Minho Kim, Kate Zernike, Lisa Friedman and Margot Sanger-Katz.
new video loaded: The Sacred Catholic Site Where Trump Wants a Border Wall
By Reis Thebault, Christina Shaman, Jon Miller, June Kim and Melanie Bencosme
June 20, 2026
Kim was, in her words, “starving for that fatherly love.”
She became an intern for Baer and always looked forward to being held in his arms for extended periods of time. She eventually asked him if there was anything she could do to help ease the fear that she believed was still holding her back.
There was, Baer told her. At his direction, she took off her top and bra, Kim said, and he held her but didn’t touch her breasts or privates.
“It felt very parental, and it felt very special,” she said.
In hindsight, Kim said, she cherished the experience for another reason.
“I was getting this special attention from him,” she said. “I was pretty desperate for that in my life.”
She now sees it as classic grooming behavior.
It happened one other time, Kim said, and she eventually asked him if there was anything else she could do to experience a “bigger shift.”
Baer brought her to the pool house and instructed her to remove her clothes piece by piece, Kim said. He lay in bed with her, rubbed her back and held her breasts, according to Kim.
“There was no talking me into it — I just did it,” Kim said. “In hindsight, I realized I didn’t feel free to say no to any of it. I had the belief that if I did say no, he would write me off.”
When Kim got the call from her daughter Penelope, she said it jolted her out of what she now describes as a cult mindset.
She spoke to other women in the community and said she heard more stories involving naked holding.
One of those women was Inge Jechart. A mother of two with a doctorate in physics, Inge had been an active Real Love member since a friend recommended Baer around 2005.
“At that time, I was lost and lonely,” she said, describing struggling under the weight of a faltering marriage and a strained relationship with her sons. “I learned how to become a better person and more loving and understanding.”
The first time Baer held her in his lap, Inge was overcome with emotion.
“I just cried,” Inge recalled. “It was such a relief to feel safe and loved. What else do we want in life?”
Following that experience, Inge said, she booked every retreat at his house that she could. And it was there, in 2017, that she said she twice got naked with Baer at his direction.
“We hold our own children when they’re naked to make them feel safe,” Inge said. “For me, that’s what we were doing.”
“And here’s the thing,” she added. “It made a huge difference for me.”
But Inge said Baer fondled her breasts the second time, and that didn’t feel right at all.
“I said, ‘Hey, as a 4-year-old, I wouldn’t have breasts,’” she recalled. “And he stopped.”
Inge said Baer told her he had done it with only one other woman before, and he added in a stern voice: “I don’t talk about this with anyone else.”
“I got the message,” Inge said. “Our community was important to me, and I didn’t want it to blow up, so I kept silent.”
But she said she never considered that he might be engaging in naked holding with younger, more impressionable women like Veena and Penelope.
Kim, Penelope’s mother, said the same.
“It had never crossed my mind that he would ever do this with my daughter,” Kim said. “I was completely blind to that possibility.”
The backlash
In February 2019, Kim sat down at her computer and began to type an email to Baer.
“Greg what you have done with my daughter…is wrong, hurtful, traumatic and goes against so many gospel principles,” read the email, which was reviewed by NBC News.
“Holding people without clothes on needs to stop, what you are doing is wrong,” it added. “Touching my daughter between her legs when she was naked was wrong — there is no justification for it.”
“I know of 4 women personally who have undressed completely with you, and I don’t know hardly anyone that you spend time with so I conjecture that there are many more,” Kim wrote near the end. “I beg of you…put a stop to this horribly damaging behavior.”
Baer was defiant in his response.
Kim’s daughter was “claiming events that never happened,” he wrote. “And she is supplying lots of details that never happened. And now she is sharing these details with as many people as she can find.”
Kim’s email wasn’t the only scathing message Baer received during this period.
“I am writing to perhaps appeal to your consciences and any integrity you may still have left,” wrote a woman from the U.K. in an email viewed by NBC News. “Shut Real Love down now before it’s too late.”
“Greg you have had sexual dealings with way more women than we initially thought,” the woman added. “That’s not including the naked holding.”
Baer replied with another strong denial.
“Nothing, absolutely nothing, like this is occurring, and people are healing all over the place,” he wrote to the British woman.
After receiving an email from NBC News, the woman declined to be interviewed, citing the lasting emotional toll.
“It’s honestly an incredibly traumatic part of my life, and one I don’t want to revisit,” she wrote. “It’s been 8 years and I haven’t moved on.”
The aftermath
Veena, Penelope and her mother said they all reached out to the police in Baer’s hometown of Rome but were told there was not enough evidence to pursue a sexual abuse case.
The Rome Police Department confirmed to NBC News that it conducted an investigation but said no charges were brought due to “insufficient probable cause.”
The women said they had also reported Baer to their local Mormon churches.
A spokesman for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, widely known as the Mormon church, said it “initiated ecclesiastical proceedings involving this individual beginning in February 2020.”
The process could lead to a member’s excommunication, but the spokesman said he was not authorized to comment on the outcome of the proceedings.
Veena and Penelope filed lawsuits against Baer in Georgia’s Floyd County Superior Court in April 2019. They were settled five months later for $12,000 each. (The attorney who represented Baer, Robert Smalley, declined to comment.)
By then, Veena was adapting to life outside of Real Love. She had already separated from her husband and left the church. While raising her three children, she went back to college. A career in physics no longer interested her. She earned a degree in psychology from Columbia University.
“To help me understand what on earth just happened,” Veena said.
A few years ago, she decided to write what became a very different book than the one originally conceived about her experience in Real Love. She used pseudonyms for the group and for Baer himself, but the account, she said, was drawn from her recollections, emails and journal entries.
“The True Happiness Company” was published last year with the subtitle, “How a Girl Like Me Falls for a Cult Like That.”
Veena hoped that it would help her process what happened and serve as a cautionary tale for others.
“The physical violation is not what unravels me,” she says in the book. “It’s the loss of life experience, the mental and emotional violation of having my young adulthood orchestrated by someone with undue influence over me. It’s the friendships that disintegrated. The career paths unexplored. The opinions he replaced with his own.”
“The changes feel almost imperceptible as they happen,” she added later in the book, “and then suddenly appear extreme in retrospect.”
If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988 or go to 988lifeline.org to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, or visit SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources.
U.S. President Donald Trump pumps his fist after touring the inside of the newest aircraft in the presidential fleet at Andrews Air Force Base on June 19, 2026 at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland.
Alex Wong
/Getty Images
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Alex Wong
/Getty Images
The newest Air Force One jet, gifted to President Trump from the Qatari government, arrived ahead of schedule on Friday to Joint Base Andrews in Maryland.
On Friday afternoon, Trump toured the luxury Boeing 747 plane that initially stirred controversy. The plane was one of the biggest foreign gifts ever received by the U.S. government and raised legal and ethical questions after Qatar offered to replace the presidential jet last year. Trump said last May he’d be “stupid” not to accept the offer. Industry groups originally said the plane could be worth approximately $400 million.
Trump also spoke standing in front of the plane, thanking the Emir of Qatar.
The president praised the workmanship of the plane, describing it as the “world’s most luxurious plane.” He also called it the “largest Air Force One ever built,” adding “it flies further and faster than any Air Force One.”
“This plane was transformed into a flying White House at a level of luxury that nobody’s ever seen before, probably even almost outside of an airplane,” Trump said. “Nobody’s ever seen anything like this, and in only 10 months, a timeframe no one thought possible.”
The exterior of the jet is no longer light blue, silver, and white – a fixture since the Kennedy administration. Trump unveiled the new red, white and blue color scheme.
“It was time for a change. … Everything was designed good. It was my taste,” Trump said saying that he approved the new color scheme, which reflects the American flag.
The VC-25B Bridge aircraft will now undertake its commissioning flights, what the Air Force calls a “final exam” for the plane. The plane was modified after serving the Qatari Head of State.
“Once these flights are successfully completed, the aircraft is officially ‘commissioned’ into the active executive airlift fleet and becomes available for presidential missions,” an Air Force press release said.
The aircraft from Qatar will “serve as a bridge until the [long-term] VC-25B is delivered,” according to earlier communications from the Air Force. The plane was delivered well before expectations. The Air Force originally estimated the plane would be delivered in 2028 but said by modifying requirements it could deliver the first aircraft in 2027. The modifications “were carefully crafted to prioritize mission over aesthetics, leaving much of the previous head of state interior layout minimally changed,” the Air Force said.
Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Ken Wilsbach praised the delivery.
“Many thought it could not be done, but the United States Air Force was able to execute and provide a secure, reliable airborne command post on an accelerated timeline,” he said.
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