Musk demands to know what Nasa staff do

Nasa staff have been told by Elon Musk’s DOGE operators to write down what they did last week, only to have their own managers tell them not to.

A “pause” order went out at the weekend, Bloomberg reports, pending further advice from Nasa officials today.

The original order from the non-departmental Department of Government Efficiency was followed by a post on X from Musk that managed to be extraordinarily menacing and depressingly juvenile.

Failure to respond with five bullet points to the question “What did you do last week?”, Musk wrote, “will be taken as a resignation”.

Musk’s SpaceX has broadly achieved its goal of cutting the cost of putting payloads in orbit by a factor of ten, and he delights in highlighting Nasa's delays and cost overruns even though Nasa accounts for most of SpaceX's income.

Note also: Nasa is risk-averse because of accidents of the kind that haven’t happened at SpaceX, but could.