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Elon Musk’s mandated email demanding federal employees detail what they accomplished last week was sent to some judiciary staff even though the executive branch has no authority over them.
After the billionaire said that failure to respond “will be taken as a resignation,” which he has since walked back following uproar, it has emerged that some judges were among those who received the email from the Office of Personnel Management.
Spokespeople from federal courts in Manhattan, Texas and Illinois have told media outlets that some judiciary employees received the email Saturday but their staff were advised to ignore it.
Julie Hodek, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois spokesperson, told NBC News that the court’s chief judge and clerk “communicated with the staff that as we are judiciary employees, our policies and procedures are governed by the Judicial Conference of the United States and our local court HR handbooks.”
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“Our communication was then followed up by a memo from the Director’s Office of the Administrative Office of the United States Courts that reinforced the same message,” she told the outlet.
Chief Judge Randy Crane of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas told Bloomberg that “many of our employees” received it, while a spokesperson for the Manhattan federal court told NBC News that both judicial employees and judges received the email.
The Independent has contacted the Office of Personnel Management for comment.
Legal experts condemned the move, with one branding it a “fundamental failure” in understanding the separation of powers, given the court system is not part of the executive branch.
“One hopes this was just an unintentional mistake,” Georgetown law professor David Cole, former ACLU national legal director, told Bloomberg. “If not, it reflects a fundamental failure to understand the first thing about the separation of powers.”
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Another expert noted that a number of legal challenges to the Trump administration’s executive orders are currently pending. Any effort by the executive branch to learn more about the inner workings of the judiciary would be “a profoundly significant violation of an internal judicial process,” Max Stearns, a professor at the University of Maryland’s law school, told Bloomberg.
“The idea that the executive branch should have some entitlement to progress reports from the internal workings of an Article III judicial chamber, especially at a time when these chambers are resolving pending matters, precisely involving a series of executive orders from the White House, is as profound a violation of separation of powers as one could conceivably imagine,” Stearns added.
After widespread backlash to the email, where department heads largely instructed their staffers to ignore it, Musk claimed Monday that it was “a test” to see if employees “had a pulse.”
He has already prompted litigation. Attorneys representing unions, businesses, veterans, and conservation organizations filed an updated lawsuit in federal court in California on Monday, arguing Musk had violated the law with his demand.
