When President-elect Donald Trump indicated that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy would advise on significant cuts to the federal government as part of his administration, many public employees realized their jobs might be at stake.
Now they have a new fear: being personally targeted by the world’s richest man — and his legions of followers.
Amid the frenzy of his daily messages last week, Musk reposted two Xs showing the names and titles of people occupying four relatively obscure climate-related government jobs. Each post has been viewed tens of millions of times, and the people named have received a flood of critical attention. At least one of the four women identified has deleted her social media accounts.
While the details he shared about those government jobs are public information available from online databases, the posts have brought to public attention otherwise nameless government employees in positions that rarely interact with the public.
Several current federal employees told D365A they’re afraid Musk will make their lives changes permanently — and that includes physically threatened behind-the-scenes bureaucrats who have become a target of one of the world’s richest men. Others said the threat of being in Musk’s crosshairs might even push them out of their jobs — accomplishing Musk’s small-government aims without a proper review.
“This is an effort to instil terror and fear at federal employees,” said Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, representing over 800,000 of the 2.3 million civilian federal employees. “It’s meant to strike fear in them so they’ll be afraid to speak out.”
This isn’t new behaviour for Musk, who routinely singles out people he says have erred or who he finds in his path. One former federal employee previously targeted by Musk said she’s faced something similar.
“It’s the way that he intimidates people to either quit or it’s a way of sending a signal to all the other agencies that ‘you’re next,’” said Mary “Missy” Cummings, an engineering and computer science professor at George Mason University, who got in Musk’s crosshairs because of her criticisms of Tesla during her time at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Going dark after attacks
Last week, Musk reshared an account with the handle Fentasyl and the name Datahazard. The account describes itself as an “Unincorporated Think Tank Focus: Govt Efficiency, Civil Rights, Victim Advocacy.”
One post states: “I see no reason for the US taxpayer to pay the salary of a ‘Director of Climate Diversification (she/her)’ at the US International Development Finance Corporation,” along with a partial screengrab of an employee and her location.
Musk, who last year described himself in an X post as “super pro-climate,” reposted the post and added, “So many fake jobs.” The post has attracted more than 33 million views and an avalanche of vitriolic comments. Some have described the role as a “fraud job,” and others have called on Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to cut jobs like it. As one user commented, “Gravy train is over.”
It seems that the woman Musk aimed for went dark on social media and closed her accounts. The agency’s name—the US International Development Finance Corporation—is said by the agency itself to provide investment support for climate mitigation, resilience, and adaptation in low-income countries that are already suffering the most devastating impacts of climate change. A DFC official added that the agency does not comment on the positions or matters of individual personnel.
Musk also castigated the Department of Energy’s chief climate officer in its loan program office. The office finances nascent energy technologies that require early investment and handed Tesla Motors $465 million in 2010, launching Musk’s electric vehicle company into the position of an electric vehicle industry leader. The chief climate officer Arrow works across agencies to “reduce barriers and enable clean energy deployment,” according to her online bio. positionAccording to her online bio, the,,. “
Another Musk target was a woman who is a senior advisor on environmental justice and climate change at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). HHS is responsible for protecting public health from pollution and other environmental hazards, with particular attention to low-income and communities of colour, which currently bear a disproportionately larger share of exposures and impacts. The office was first opened at HHS under Biden in 2022.
They even targeted a senior adviser to climate at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The woman “should not have been paid $181,648.00 by the US taxpayer to serve the role of ‘Climate advisor’ at HUD,” the original X post read. Musk shared with the comment: “But maybe her advice is amazing.” With two crying laughing emojis after.
D365A contacted the four federal employees, who either declined comment or could not be reached. D365A also contacted HHS, DOE, and HUD to comment.
X did not reply to an email seeking comment.
The AFGE public union noted that Musk himself has benefited from government programs as a federal contractor, with those contractors getting about $750 billion per year of the federal budget compared with only around $200 billion for the civilian federal workforce. “We’re a comparative steal, and we want to help clean it up, too,” Kelley said.
Putting people in harm’s way
Musk has done this sort of thing before — and it’s precipitated real danger for the people he named.
Musk was furious about the appointment of Missy Cummings as a senior advisor at the N.H.T.S.A. because her research and public comments had criticized Tesla’s driver-assist programs and advocated for regulating the systems.
Musk focused his ire on Cummings via what was then called Twitter, and his armies, in turn, fell in line.
In an interview, Cummings said that she received a deluge of attacks, including death threats, forcing her to move and then eventually move temporarily.
Cummings said she already knows of federal employees — people “who have dedicated their lives to civil service” — already quitting their jobs, anticipating what’s to come.
“He wanted people like this, these kinds of people, to be intimidated and just up and quit so he didn’t have to fire anybody. So his plan, to some degree, is working,” she said.
D365A contacted numerous experts and academics who study cyber harassment, doxing and online abuse. But many declined to speak on the record, fearing becoming a target of Musk’s themselves.
“Incredible and horrific chilling is what has happened,” said one of them.
A second told us they are “not surprised” with Musk’s re-posts and that they are an instance of a “classic pattern” of cyber harassment.
Ramaswamy did not directly answer questions about whether it is appropriate to single out individual federal employees but told D365A: “Most federal employees, like most human beings, are fundamentally good people and need to be treated with respect, but the real problem is the bureaucracy.”
“Our adversary is no single person. “Our opponent is the bureaucracy,” he added.
The Fentasyl account, which is anonymous, wrote in a follow-up post: You shouldn’t harass someone just because they hold a senior government plum job that probably shouldn’t exist. “But government officials at the senior level are not just rank-and-file employees. We have a right to know who runs our government & what they do.”
Cummings, one of the first female fighter pilots in the US Navy, has said she felt a duty to speak out.
“Someone has got to come out and say it,” she said. “I’m just not going to let him win this one.”