WASHINGTON >> It’s not his fault.

Billionaire Elon Musk is telling Republican lawmakers that he is not to blame for the firings of thousands of federal workers, including veterans, as pushes to downsize the government. Instead, he said in private talks this week that those decisions are left to the various federal agencies.

The message from one of President Donald Trump’s most influential advisers came as Republicans publicly support Musk’s work at the Department of Government Efficiency digging up waste, fraud and abuse, but are privately raising questions as personnel cuts ripple through communities across the nation.

“Elon doesn’t fire people,” said Rep. Richard Hudson, R-N.C., after a dinner-time pizza meeting with Musk in the basement of the Capitol.

“He doesn’t have hiring and firing authority,” added Hudson, who leads the House Republicans’ campaign arm. “The president’s empowered him to go uncover this information, that’s it.”

It’s a shift of emphasis away from the chainsaw-wielding tech entrepreneur whose vast power has made him an admired, revered and deeply feared figure in the second Trump administration.

President’s view

The Republican president weighed in Thursday after a Cabinet meeting, saying he has instructed department secretaries to work with DOGE but to “be very precise” about which workers will stay or go — using a “‘scalpel’” he said in a social media post “rather than the ‘hatchet.”

“I don’t want to see a big cut where a lot of good people are cut,” Trump later told reporters in the Oval Office.

Trump suggested that Cabinet and agency leaders would take the lead, but Musk could push harder down the line.

“If they can cut, it’s better. And if they don’t cut, then Elon will do the cutting.”

He had said in the earlier post that Musk and Cabinet officials will meet every two weeks to advance their cost-cutting goals

The comments come amid mounting legal disputes over Musk’s attempts to centralize management of the government workforce and bypass the traditional role of Congress to appropriate federal dollars.

For example, the White House’s Office of Personnel Management directed federal agencies to fire probationary workers, who lack full civil service protection. The scorched-earth approach led to deep cuts that have occasionally been reversed, such as when workers on nuclear weapons programs were brought back on the job.

A federal judge in San Francisco expressed concerns that layoffs violated the law, leading administration officials to insist that it was individual agencies — not Musk or the Office of Personnel Management — calling the shots.

Rep. Carlos Gimenez, R-Fla., said Musk told lawmakers that “some of the folks that were the probationary people, he didn’t fire them, they were actually supposedly fired by the agencies — and they messed up.”

Did Musk actually say “they messed up?”

“Well, if they were in fact, you know, critical people, and the agency did the firing, then yeah, they messed up,” Gimenez said. “But not him.”

How it’s played out

Musk and his team have burrowed into agencies, accessing sensitive data and rattling career officials with their demands. Top officials, including at the Social Security Administration, abruptly stepped down after refusing to comply with Musk’s team. Tens of thousands of workers accepted an offer to resign early and more are facing potential layoffs.

“We’re making good progress,” Musk said late Wednesday as he dashed through the halls of the Capitol.

When the topic of the fired federal workers came up during a Senate lunch, Musk deflected blame.

“I would say that there was an argument that that’s not coming from DOGE, it’s actually coming from individual agencies,” said Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky.

Another Republican, Rep. Andy Barr of Kentucky, said that Musk went so far as to emphasize that not only had DOGE not recommended mass termination of probationary employees, but that he thought some federal agencies were either incompetent or sabotaging the effort. Musk told them he wanted more precise terminations of those not performing.

“The point that he was making is that DOGE had not made recommendations for across-the-board cuts of all probationary employees at every agency,” Barr said.

Meantime, scores of fired workers are being recalled back to work across the federal agencies. This week, about 180 employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were being told they could come back, in an email that said: “Read this email immediately.”