Shortly after Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter in 2022, he sent executives on a mission: Conduct a payroll audit.

Musk wanted to verify that all of the social media platform’s employees were “real humans,” a request that perplexed executives at the company. Nonetheless, managers were tasked with confirming that some of their direct reports were indeed alive.

“As if there’s just people collecting paychecks and not doing anything, as if they don’t have supervisors,” said Jay Holler, a former supervisor at Twitter who led an engineering team when Musk took over. “The whole idea was just fundamentally absurd and ignorant of how things actually work.”

Now, with Musk leading the charge on a White House effort to radically reduce the size of the federal workforce, the billionaire’s preoccupation with phantom workers has returned.

In recent weeks, millions of federal employees have been sent emails from a generic government account demanding they list their weekly accomplishments in five bullet points — messages that have prompted confusion and mixed advice across dozens of federal agencies.

But Musk has made it clear: the emails are aimed at validating existing, breathing, employees, a point he emphasized at a Trump administration Cabinet meeting last month.

“They’re literally fictional individuals, or someone is collecting a paycheck on a fictional individual,” Musk said. “So what we’re literally trying to figure out is: Are these people real? Are they alive?”

It was a deja vu moment for former Twitter engineer Yao You, who worked under Musk. To her, the campaign to catch ghost employees lurking on the payroll is really about something else.

“Part of that is making his presence felt very acutely, ”I’m the boss. I’m now overseeing your work, you better make me happy.’ So just putting it on peoples’ mind,” You said. She noted that Musk showed little tolerance for dissenters at Twitter after his purchase of the company. You sees the emails to government employees as a loyalty test.

“It’s not so much about commitment to the company,” she said. “In this case, I guess, commitment to the federal government. It’s about a personal commitment to Elon Musk.”

It’s something You got used to following Musk’s 2022 hostile acquisition of Twitter for $44 billion, a purchase the tech mogul turned into a splashy photo op by walking into the company’s San Francisco headquarters carrying a white porcelain sink. He posted a video of the moment on Twitter with the caption, “Entering Twitter HQ – let that sink in!” 

An image from a video posted by Musk on Oct. 26, 2022, shows himself carrying a sink as he entered the Twitter headquarters in San Francisco shortly before he took control of the social media platform he later renamed X.

/Twitter account of Elon Musk/AFP/AFP

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/Twitter account of Elon Musk/AFP/AFP

And after that sunk in, Musk kicked off the hunt for non-existent employees just before workers were set to receive a bonus, and Musk would not pay it out until the “ghost employee” theory was investigated, The New York Times reported at the time. Musk eventually renamed the platform X and turned it into a pro-Trump megaphone.

Musk and the White House did not return requests seeking any evidence that the federal government has non-existent people on its payroll.

The possibility of dead people receiving Social Security checks has also animated Musk. He’s said “tens of millions” of dead people are getting the federal support — which is not true.

‘Be ready with 50 pages of code’

Some ex-Twitter employees, such as Holler, think the five-bullet-point emails are a performative stunt.

Holler remembers one moment from some of his final days at the company when a message arrived from one of Musk’s assistants.

“You’re scheduled to meet with Elon at 10:30 this morning. Be ready with 50 pages of code,” said Holler, recalling a message he received on Slack, the workplace messaging app.

To check whether Twitter engineers were real, or productive, managers like Holler were told to print out the software code they had recently written, also known as “code commits” in engineering parlance.

“That was an interesting nerd snipe,” Holler said. “Because we don’t think about code in pages. You don’t print code out. It’s fundamentally run by computers. You edit it on a computer.”

Ian Brown, a former Twitter engineer manager who left before Musk’s acquisition, said this idea would be comical if it were not so offensive.

“The culture was absolutely focused on high-performing, talent-dense teams. There was no one phoning it in,” Brown said. “The wild sort of paranoia of woke zombies not doing stuff is just complete fantasy.”

In the end, Musk scrapped the idea and never evaluated engineers’ printed-out software code.

But before he backed away from the plan, the company was, like the whole federal workforce right now, confused, scared and at the unpredictable whim of Elon Musk.

“Nobody is going to thrive in an environment like this,” You, the former Twitter engineer, said of working under Musk. “But if the goal is to survive without losing your sanity, supporting each other, just talking through it, and knowing you’re not suffering alone, can help,” she said. “To know you’re not suffering silently.”

The Trump administration is considering terminating leases for properties housing vital weather service operations and other fisheries operations, according to Craig McLean, a former official of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Andrew Rosenberg, a former deputy director of NOAA’s national marine fisheries services, as well as a current NOAA contractor who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of losing their job. One of the potential lease terminations includes a key weather forecasting center in College Park, Maryland.

NOAA has historically employed around 12,000 staff who work on a range of issues from climate change to managing the nation’s multibillion-dollar commercial fisheries. The agency monitors and forecasts extreme weather, including hurricanes and floods, and provides the data that feeds local TV meteorologists’ forecasts and the weather apps on your phone.

The agency is also terminating at least four expert advisory committees, according to an email that NPR obtained from the current NOAA contractor. The email details the termination of the Advisory Committee on Excellence in Space, Climate Services Advisory Committee, Marine and Coastal Area-based Management Advisory Committee and the Marine Fisheries Advisory Committee.

That NOAA contractor also told NPR that the potential closure of the Maryland weather forecasting facility is especially concerning. “Anything that is getting cancelled with the weather program is a terrible idea,” the contractor says. “Loss of an entire facility would hamper our ability to do our jobs, predict the weather properly, help protect people and property.”

McLean says if lease terminations happen that would be “remarkably stupid,” and that a closure in Maryland could mean the agency would have trouble providing accurate forecasts that serve a wide swath of people from mariners to pilots.  McLean says the products at the College Park facility, “are distributed to the weather forecast offices across the country.”

NOAA is part of the Department of Commerce. Neither agency responded to NPR’s requests for comment. A White House official speaking on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak on the record to the press said the administration is reevaluating the lease terms but is not closing the buildings.

“Someone is sitting at an absolutely unlearned level determining what contracts to end,” says McLean, who served across several previous administrations. He says in his conversations with current NOAA employees there’s confusion about what is happening that is “destabilizing.”

Signage outside the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland, on Monday, March 3, 2025. Hundreds of employees at the climate and weather research agency have been fired, including at least three Bay Area weather service employees, raising concerns about NOAA’s ability to serve the public.

Daniel Heuer/Bloomberg via Getty Images

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Daniel Heuer/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The latest news comes after NOAA began firing at least 800 workers — part of government-wide layoffs ordered by the Trump administration to reduce the size of the federal government.

The terminations included staff at the National Weather Service, which is tasked with generating weather forecasts that millions of people in the U.S. rely on.

As NPR previously reported, the White House sent a memo to federal agency directors ordering them to prepare plans for “large-scale reductions in force” by March 13, though the picture continues to be muddled by the administration’s frequent policy changes, as well as ongoing legal and administrative procedures.

“Tax dollars are being siphoned off to fund unproductive and unnecessary programs that benefit radical interest groups while hurting hard-working American citizens,” the memo from Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought and Office of Personnel Management acting director Charles Ezell states.

It calls the federal government “bloated” and “corrupt.”

The memo orders agency directors to lay off large numbers of staff, save money, and get rid of real estate, all while increasing productivity and providing “better service for the American people.”

As details on the cuts emerged at locations across the country, current and former workers at NOAA said the cuts threatened key public services, from weather forecasts to wildlife management.

“It befuddles me to see how unplugging and disassembling rather intricate services that the nation has been provided by this federal agency and others is really making America great again,” McLean says. “We are going backwards.”

In the Bay Area, cuts hit already strained weather forecasters 

Member station KQED reported that at least three people at the National Weather Service’s Bay Area office were fired, according to Dalton Behringer, the office’s union steward for the National Weather Service Employees Organization. The three employees — a meteorologist, an administrative support assistant and a facilities technician — were probationary, a distinction indicating they were relatively new to the agency or their current role. They received emails notifying them of their termination before their supervisors were aware, according to Behringer.

Behringer, a meteorologist for the Bay Area office, spoke to KQED after hours in his union capacity.

The Bay Area NWS office, which serves more than 8 million residents across 11 counties in the San Francisco and Monterey Bay regions, was already down one meteorologist, Behringer said. It will now operate with a staff of 22, with 20% of the remaining employees eligible for retirement.

The work of the fired employees “is going to get spread to those of us who are already overworked, and we’re understaffed,” he said.

More than 20 staffers were laid off Feb. 27 at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Virginia Key lab in Miami, Florida, including scientists who help improve hurricane forecasts and study valuable fish populations.

NOAA

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NOAA

In Florida, fears over hurricane forecasting 

Member station WLRN reported that nearly two dozen scientists based at NOAA’s Virginia Key offices in Miami, Florida were laid off last Thursday, according to a NOAA biologist and a source who worked closely with the agency. Both spoke on the condition of requested anonymity out of fear of losing their job or having funding cut.

They say the cuts are a direct hit to hurricane research and fisheries management vital to protecting U.S. shores.

They confirmed about 16 fired scientists worked in fisheries and a half dozen on hurricane modeling and forecasting.

One of those fired was Andy Hazelton, a meteorologist who worked on improving hurricane forecasts.

He flew repeated missions aboard NOAA’s hurricane hunter planes and focused his research on one of the most pressing concerns: hurricanes that intensify suddenly, giving little warning to the public and emergency managers.

Hazelton, who has four young kids, said working for NOAA had been a lifelong goal.

He said he grew up in areas in Central Florida where he’s experienced hurricanes “so doing modeling and working for NOAA was really a dream.”

At the Virginia Key lab, he helped develop a next-generation hurricane forecasting model as part of a partnership between NOAA and the University of Miami.

The research done by Hazelton and others has helped to dramatically improve hurricane forecasts in a short amount of time. The latest model Hazelton worked on improved track forecasts by 8% and intensity forecasts by 10%, according to the National Hurricane Center. That’s allowing forecasters to better understand when those short-fuse storms might explode and make landfalls more lethal.

With the cuts to NOAA, that progress is threatened across the agency, says Rick Spinrad, the former NOAA administrator under the Biden administration.

“Any of the progress that has been made over the last several years, including in reducing the errors in the track forecast of hurricanes, reducing the errors in the intensity forecast, I think it’s safe to say that that will be compromised,” he says.

An orca whale known as L95, right, swims with other whales from the L and K pods in the Pacific Ocean near the mouth of the Columbia River near Ilwaco, Wash., days after being fitted with a satellite tag. One of the people fired at NOAA worked on protecting whales such as orcas from oil spills, ship strikes and fishing gear.

NOAA Northwest Fisheries Science Center via AP/NOAA Northwest Fisheries Science Center

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NOAA Northwest Fisheries Science Center via AP/NOAA Northwest Fisheries Science Center

In Seattle, NOAA cuts include orca-saving employee 

Hanna Miller was on vacation in Hawaii when she opened her work email and learned that she no longer had a job.

Until last Thursday, she was a natural resource specialist with NOAA, focused on protecting whales from oil spills, ship strikes and fishing gear.

“The Agency finds that you are not fit for continued employment because your ability, knowledge and/or skills do not fit the Agency’s current needs,” the email from Vice Admiral Nancy Hann, Deputy Under Secretary for Operations, read.

“[I] just read it and had enough time to read it and share it with my personal email before I got locked out of my work account,” Miller told KUOW. “I was just really devastated.”

Miller was awarded employee of the year for NOAA Fisheries in the western United States in 2023, and in March 2024, she was promoted. Miller was a week and a half from completing her year-long post-promotion probation when she was fired.

In 2022, Miller helped a multi-agency team make sure endangered orcas didn’t swim into diesel fuel belching out of the sunken Aleutian Isle fishing boat off Washington’s San Juan Island.

“I was on call for 42 days, tracking them every second that I was awake to make sure that they didn’t go through [the oil spill],” Miller said.

“Per long-standing practice, we are not discussing internal personnel and management matters,” NOAA spokesperson James Miller emailed in response to a KUOW interview and information request.

“Public servants are people who are very dedicated to protecting, well, in my case, protecting species and the ocean,” Miller said. “We could have taken higher-paying jobs in other fields, but we’ve chosen these ones because we care.”

Edited by Sadie Babits and Rachel Waldholz.

President Trump and Elon Musk’s plans for a wholesale reduction of the federal workforce have brought turmoil to a sector long seen as a bastion of stability. The Trump administration says more cuts are coming, even as some government agencies rush to reverse what they say were mistaken layoffs. Workers are also challenging their terminations, finding notable success.

The effort raises speculation about the administration’s goals, along with warnings against politicizing the U.S. civil service. Critical questions can inform that debate, such as: How does the U.S. federal workforce compare with those of other countries?

Is the U.S. government “bloated”?

Many calls for shrinking the U.S. government cite “bloat” and excessive spending. But experts say that while governments can always work to be more efficient, the size of the United States’ federal workforce is well in line with those of its peers.

“The federal government is smaller proportionately than you would see in other countries” such as Great Britain, Canada or Australia, says Max Stier, president and CEO of Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan nonprofit that focuses on improving government.

That’s partly because the size of the U.S. federal workforce hasn’t kept pace with decades of population growth.

“The head count today of the [U.S.] federal workforce is essentially the same as it was in 1969,” Stier says. “And that’s in absolute terms. In relative terms regarding the size of the population, it’s shrunk a lot — and the responsibilities of our government have increased.”

In the late 1960s, the number of federal workers hovered above 2 million (excluding Postal Service workers), according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In January 2025, the number stood at 2.4 million.

But there are many more Americans to serve. In October 1969, the U.S. population was about 202.5 million, according to the Census Bureau. At the start of 2025, it was estimated at 341.1 million, the bureau said.

Federal workers accounted for 1.87% of the civilian workforce as of last November, according to the Pew Research Center — and that figure includes more than 600,000 postal workers.

In terms of cost, workers’ pay and benefits account for around 6% of federal spending, Elizabeth Linos, an associate professor of public policy and management at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and director of The People Lab, told NPR’s Fresh Air.

Federal governments can be fairly small if states have relative autonomy in providing some government services, as in the U.S. and Australia. This is one of many variables that can make it difficult to directly compare federal governments.

“The U.S. is a strongly federal system,” says Filipe Campante, a professor of political economy and governance at Johns Hopkins University. “So there’s a lot more that falls under the responsibility of lower levels of government compared to more centralized countries, like France or the U.K.”

When looking at the U.S. public sector overall — including local, state and federal governments — those workers account for just under 15% of total employment, according to the 38-member Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). That’s below the 18% average for the countries in the organization.

Another difference lies in what motivates U.S. federal workers. More than 90% of U.S. civil servants say it’s important that their work contributes to the common good, according to a 2023 OECD report. The figure was notably higher than those of their counterparts in Great Britain and other countries.

1990s cuts brought an “explosion” of contractors

So, how does the federal government provide more services without adding employees? It pays private contractors for services and products.

“In any given year, about $270 billion are spent on federal workers’ salaries and benefits,” Linos says. “Just to put that in perspective, there are specific departments whose contracting budget is larger than that budget.”

In the 2023 fiscal year, the federal government “committed about $759 billion on contracts,” the Government Accountability Office reported. Most of that figure — $478 billion — went toward buying “professional support services” for defense and civilian agencies, and $281 billion was for products, from drugs to airplanes. 

Federal contractors became prevalent after the last large-scale effort to shed government jobs — the Clinton administration’s Reinventing Government initiative of the 1990s.

President Bill Clinton, seen here in 1995, discusses his Reinventing Government initiative, which cut more than 400,000 jobs over seven years. But an “explosion” in the use of contractors followed, says Elizabeth Linos, an associate professor of public policy and management at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

Joyce Naltchayan/AFP via Getty Images

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Joyce Naltchayan/AFP via Getty Images

That overhaul took place over seven years. Linos says that around “400,000 federal positions were cut through a combination of departures and attrition, and some layoffs.”

The end result wasn’t exactly the lean federal government some had hoped for. The cuts brought an “explosion” in contract workers, Linos says, adding, “Today, we have something like three times as many [contractors] delivering the work of government” than federal workers.

Other countries, like Australia, are in somewhat similar patterns, often contracting or privatizing services such as utilities, medical care and child care.

“We do a lot of that as you generally do in the U.S.,” says Andrew Podger, a professor at the Australian National University who is also a fellow in the National Academy of Public Administration.

Political appointees are already a hallmark of the U.S. 

Trump is looking to reclassify thousands of influential federal jobs as political appointments — an idea he frequently mentioned during the campaign season.

Such a move would add to a glaring divide: The U.S. already uses political appointments to fill more jobs than many countries with similar governments.

“We have an outsized number of political appointments,” Stier says, citing around 4,000 political appointees.

Among the United States’ peer democracies, “they typically count their political appointees in tens, not in thousands,” he says. “So we really already have a vestige of the old spoils system.”

President Trump smiles during a Feb. 26 Cabinet meeting at the White House, with Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who oversees the Department of Government Efficiency, standing in the background. Trump says he wants more federal positions to be politically appointed, but experts say the U.S. already has some 4,000 appointed positions.

Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

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Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

The U.S. has repeatedly worked to standardize civil service, from the Pendleton Act in 1883 to the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978.

“In the 19th century, the idea was you could get a job in government just by displaying loyalty to the new political administration,” Linos says. “And what that led to was lower levels of performance, less merit in government and, ultimately, worse outcomes for residents.”

But the gap persists. As proof, Campante of Johns Hopkins University suggests looking at how governmental transitions take place in the U.K. versus the United States.

“When they have an election, literally, pretty much like the day after, there is a transition in government” in the U.K., Campante says. “Basically the civil service remains in place.”

Both Stier and Campante see Trump’s push for more appointments as a worrying sign, because it would give the executive branch tighter control over career civil servants.

“We have too many already,” Stier says of political appointees. “The challenge there is that you wind up with people who frankly are not chosen on the basis of merit” but because of politics. That leads to leaders not understanding the systems they oversee, which results in worse government, he says.

Then there’s the accountability issue

“I think that the politicization of the civil service is one of the key dramatic changes that are happening right now,” Campante says. “And that’s by [the Trump administration’s] own admission, right? It’s not even like a secret. They’re really kind of making the point that they think that that should be the case.”

Trump’s plan to replace tens of thousands of career civil servants has been percolating since the final months of his first term, when he signed an executive order saying he needed more flexibility and control in choosing workers he would rely on to enact his policies. On Jan. 20, 2025, he reinstated the policy, known as “Schedule F,” saying it would “restore accountability to the career civil service.”

And in Trump’s Feb. 11 executive order about reshaping the workforce through the Department of Government Efficiency, he set a goal of eliminating not only waste but also “insularity.”

In Campante’s view, the president’s goal is “really to kind of reduce that independence and that insulation of the civil service from political control.”

He notes that in Brazil, former President Jair Bolsonaro now faces formal charges of attempting a coup to remain in power after his 2022 election defeat. It’s a contrast, Campante says, to how the U.S. handled Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Alex Wild (center), a former National Park Service ranger who was fired on Feb. 14, holds a sign during a protest against widespread layoffs at Yosemite National Park in California on March 1. The National Parks Conservation Association estimates that 1,000 National Park Service employees who were on one-year probationary periods were laid off. About 3,400 employees of the U.S. Forest Service were among the cuts too, according to multiple media reports.

Laure Andrillon/AFP via Getty Images

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Laure Andrillon/AFP via Getty Images

After taking office this year, Trump issued pardons for hundreds of violent rioters. His administration also dismissed more than two dozen prosecutors who worked on Jan. 6 cases, and it launched an inquiry into FBI staff members involved in Jan. 6 investigations.

To be able to hold leaders accountable, Campante says, civil servants need protections from being fired and politically targeted.

“That role of accountability is, I think, an important aspect that is being seriously degraded right now,” he says.

Stier says he has seen the same pattern when countries move away from democracy and toward authoritarianism.

“One of the first moves is to change the civil service, the government workforce, to a loyalist workforce as opposed to a merit-driven workforce,” he says.