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Confusion and chaos loom as hundreds of thousands of federal employees begin their workweek on Monday facing a deadline from President Donald Trump’s cost-cutting chief, Elon Musk, to explain their recent accomplishments or risk losing their jobs.Musk’s unusual demand has faced resistance from several key U.S. agencies led by the president’s loyalistsincluding the FBI, State Department, Homeland Security, and the Pentagonwhich instructed their employees over the weekend not to comply. Lawmakers in both parties said that Musk’s mandate may be illegal, while unions are threatening to sue.Trump over the weekend called for Musk to be more aggressive in his cost-cutting crusade through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, and posted a meme on social media mocking federal employees who “cried about Trump and Elon.”Musk’s team sent an email to hundreds of thousands of federal employees on Saturday giving them roughly 48 hours to report five specific things they had accomplished last week. In a separate message on X, Musk said any employee who failed to respond by the deadlineset in the email as 11:59 p.m. EST Mondaywould lose their job.Mass confusion followed on the eve of the deadline as some agencies resisted the order, others encouraged their workers to comply, and still others offered conflicting guidance.One message on Sunday morning from the Department of Health and Human Services, led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., instructed its roughly 80,000 employees to comply. That was shortly after the acting general counsel, Sean Keveney, had instructed some not to. And by Sunday evening, agency leadership issued new instructions that employees should “pause activities” related to the request until noon on Monday.“I’ll be candid with you. Having put in over 70 hours of work last week advancing Administration’s priorities, I was personally insulted to receive the below email,” Keveney said in an email viewed by the Associated Press that acknowledged a broad sense of “uncertainty and stress” within the agency.Keveney laid out security concerns and pointed out some of the work done by the agency’s employees may be protected by attorney-client privilege: “I have received no assurances that there are appropriate protections in place to safeguard responses to this email.”Democrats and even some Republicans, including Sen. John Curtis, R-Utah, were critical of Musk’s ultimatum.“If I could say one thing to Elon Musk, it’s like, please put a dose of compassion in this,” Curtis, whose state has 33,000 federal employees, said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “These are real people. These are real lives. These are mortgages. . . . It’s a false narrative to say we have to cut and you have to be cruel to do it as well.”Newly confirmed FBI Director Kash Patel, an outspoken Trump ally, instructed employees to ignore Musk’s request, at least for now.“The FBI, through the Office of the Director, is in charge of all of our review processes, and will conduct reviews in accordance with FBI procedures,” Patel wrote in an email confirmed by the AP. “When and if further information is required, we will coordinate the responses. For now, please pause any responses.”Ed Martin, interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, sent his staff a message Sunday that may have caused more confusion.“Let me clarify: We will comply with this OPM request whether by replying or deciding not to reply,” Martin wrote in the email obtained by the AP, referring to the Office of Personnel Management.“Please make a good faith effort to reply and list your activities (or not, as you prefer), and I will, as I mentioned, have your back regarding any confusion,” Martin continued. “We can do this.”Officials at the Departments of State, Defense, and Homeland Security were more consistent.Tibor Nagy, acting undersecretary of state for management, told employees in an email that department leadership would respond on behalf of workers. “No employee is obligated to report their activities outside of their Department chain of command,” Nagy wrote in an email.Pentagon leadership instructed employees to “pause” any response to Musk’s team, according to an email from Jules Hurst, the deputy undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness.The Homeland Security Department, meanwhile, told employees that “no reporting action from you is needed at this time” and that agency managers would respond, according to an email from R.D. Alles, deputy undersecretary for management.Thousands of government employees have already been forced out of the federal workforceeither by being fired or through a “deferred resignation” offerduring the first month of Trump’s second term. There is no official figure available for the total firings or layoffs so far, but the AP has tallied hundreds of thousands of workers who are being affected. Many work outside of Washington.Musk on Sunday called his latest request “a very basic pulse check.”“The reason this matters is that a significant number of people who are supposed to be working for the government are doing so little work that they are not checking their email at all!” Musk wrote on X. “In some cases, we believe non-existent people or the identities of dead people are being used to collect paychecks. In other words, there is outright fraud.”He has provided no evidence of such fraud. Separately, Musk and Trump have falsely claimed in recent days that tens of millions of dead people over 100 years old are receiving Social Security payments.Meanwhile, thousands of other employees are preparing to leave the federal workforce this coming week, including probationary civilian workers at the Pentagon and all but a fraction of U.S. Agency for International Development staffers through cuts or leave. Peoples reported from New York. Associated Press writers Byron Tau, Ellen Knickmeyer, Matthew Perrone and Tara Copp in Washington and Valerie Gonzalez in McAllen, Texas, contributed to this report. Steve Peoples, Eric Tucker and Amanda Seitz, Associated Press
Category:
E-Commerce
Fabric and craft retailer Joann Inc. is officially shutting down all of its stores following a turbulent bankruptcy process. The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in January for the second time in less than a year, initially saying it would keep its stores open while restructuring its debt. However, just weeks after the filing, Joann reversed course and announced it would close 500 of its roughly 800 locations, as Fast Company reported. The closure of those stores was just the beginning. As part of the ongoing bankruptcy proceedings, Joann held an auction on February 21 to sell off its assets. A limited liability company called GA Joann Retail Partnership, which is a subsidiary of “asset disposition” company GA Group, emerged as the winning bidder, and will now oversee the complete liquidation of Joanns remaining operations. The move is still subject to court approval. What happens next for Joann? A final sale hearing has been scheduled for February 26 in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware. This hearing will formally approve the asset sale, paving the way for the complete wind-down of Joanns operations across the country. Despite the imminent closures, Joann has assured customers that it will offer substantial discounts during its going-out-of-business sales. These sales will begin immediately at all locations, allowing customers to purchase the remaining inventory at discounted prices. Joanns website and mobile app will also remain operational, enabling online shoppers to make their final purchases before the company ceases all operations entirely. The end of an era for the crafting community The collapse of the national retail chain marks an end to what was once a dominant force in the fabric and crafting world. Joann had been a go-to retailer for crafters, quilters, and sewing enthusiasts for decades. Its decline underscores the ongoing struggles faced by traditional brick-and-mortar retailers amid rising competition from online stores and shifting consumer habits. Joanns closing is expected to have lasting effects on crafters, as the retailers stores were not only places to shop but also hubs for classes, events, and a sense of community.
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E-Commerce
HIRING: Park ranger. SEEKING: Nuclear submarine engineer. WANTED: Sled dog musher.If they seem unlikely postings, they probably are. But a laid-off federal worker can dream.Axed from jobs not easily found outside government, thousands of federal workers caught in President Donald Trump’s cost-cutting efforts now face a difficult search for work.“If you’re doing, say, vegetation sampling and prescribed fire as your main work, there aren’t many jobs,” says Eric Anderson, 48, of Chicago, who was fired Feb. 14 from his job as a biological science technician at Indiana Dunes National Park.All the years of work Anderson put inthe master’s degree, the urban forestry classes, the wildfire deploymentsseemed to disappear in a single email dismissing him.He’s hoping there’s a chance he’s called back, but if he isn’t, he’s not sure what he’ll do next. He was so consumed with his firing that he broke a molar from grinding his teeth. But he knows he’s caught in something larger than himself, as the new administration unfurls its chaotic cost-cutting agenda.“This is someone coming in and tossing a hand grenade and seeing what will happen,” he says.The federal job cuts are the work of the Department of Government Efficiency, headed by billionaire Elon Musk, who has been tearing through agencies looking for suspected waste. No official tally of firings has been released, but the list stretches into the thousands and to nearly every part of the country. More than 80% of the federal government’s 2.4-million-person civilian workforce is based outside of the Washington area.Cathy Nguyen, 51, of Honolulu, was laid off last month from her job at USAID, where she helped manage the PEPFAR program, which combats HIV/AIDS.Her firing not only brought the turmoil of finding new health insurance, halting saving for retirement and her kids’ college education, and trimming spending for things like the family subscription to Disney Plusit also has forced her to reconsider her career goals.PEPFAR is a landmark effort that stretches across dozens of countries and is credited with saving some 26 million lives. Nothing rivals it. So where does a former PEPFAR worker go?“It’s requiring me to rethink how I want to spend my professional life,” Nguyen says.As specialized as Nguyen’s work has been, Mitch Flanigan may have her beat.Flanigan, 40, was assigned to the sled dog kennels at Denali National Park and Preserve in Alaska until he was fired Feb. 14. It never brought a huge paycheck, but where else could he get to work as a dog musher against such a breathtaking panorama?He has appealed his firing with the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board.“I still kind of want to fight for the job that I lost,” he says. “I’m not really making much money, it’s just fun and it’s a unique thing to be a part of.”A November report from the Federal Salary Council, which advises on government pay, found that federal salaries were one-fourth lower than those in the private sector.A Congressional Budget Office report released last year found pay disparities depended on workers’ education. Federal workers with a high school diploma or less outearned their private-sector counterparts with 17% higher wages, the CBO found. That edge disappeared among better-educated workers. Workers with bachelor’s degrees had wages 10% lower than the private sector and those with professional degrees or doctorates earned 29% less. Federal benefits were vastly better than the private sector for the lowest-educated workers, the CBO found, and about even for the highest-educated workers.Many laid off from federal positions were drawn by stability, benefits, and, more than anything, the opportunity to do work they might not be able to do anywhere else. Now, everyone from diplomats to public health workers are flooding the job market looking for suitable positions.Gracie Lynne, a 32-year-old fellow at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, who lives in Eugene, Oregon, took a pay cut when she started her job four years ago.Her parents lost their home during the Great Recession, which led to their divorce, years of financial angst, and Lynne’s own interest in financial regulation. She found herself following the nascent CFPB’s rulemaking and poring over 1,000-page bills on bank regulations. She wrote her master’s thesis on the bureau. She couldn’t pass up the job.“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” she told herself.Plus, she thought, the benefits would come in handy when her and her husband decided to start a family. Now, six months pregnant, she finds herself jobless and scrambling to get insured.She isn’t sure where she’ll land, or if she’ll find many employers rushing to hire someone about to become a mother. But she feels more committed than ever to the work she did.“I feel even more compelled to stay in the public sector after this experience,” she says, noting the good work protecting consumers she was every day, “to stay in the fight.”Luke Tobin, a 24-year-old forestry technician who worked for the U.S. Forest Service in Idaho’s Nez Perce National Forest, who was fired from his job February 14, finds the accusations of waste by Musk and others laughable. He sees extreme understaffing and threadbare budgets.He earned about $19 an hour and was furloughed for about half of the year but still relished a job that had him backpacking in remote areas for days at a time.Scrambling to find a replacement job, he’s put in dozens of applications. He has pursued openings on tree farms, at tree-trimming companies and at nurseries, but so far, has only heard back from two employers on two minimum-wage jobs: one as an Amazon delivery person and the other as a line cook at a fried chicken restaurant.“I need a job,” he says, “any job.” Associated Press writer Mark Thiessen in Anchorage, Alaska, contributed to this report. Matt Sedensky can be reached at msedensky@ap.org and https://x.com/sedensky. Matt Sedensky, AP National Writer
Category:
E-Commerce
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