No proof Elon Musk ordered all federal workers to pass drug tests or be fired
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The claim: Elon Musk announced mandatory drug testing for all federal employees, giving them 30 days to pass or be fired
A Feb. 15 Threads post (direct link, archive link) claims to share news of a mandate from a billionaire White House adviser to all federal employees.
'Elon Musk just dropped a bombshell: anyone with a federal paycheck has 30 days to pass a drug test or get fired,' reads text in the post.
The post received more than 1,000 likes in three days. Similar versions of the claim circulated on X, on Instagram and elsewhere on Threads.
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Our rating: False
There is no credible evidence of the announcement from Musk referenced in the post.
No evidence of drug-testing announcement from Musk
Musk, the world's wealthiest person, was put in charge of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency and tasked with cutting costs and dismantling the federal bureaucracy. As part of their cash-savings push, his lieutenants have swept through numerous government agencies and the Trump administration has fired thousands of federal employees.
There is no credible evidence, however, that he made the announcement that is attributed to him in the Threads post. The social media user who shared it did not provide any evidence to support the claim.
Fact check: DOGE didn't find $600 million in Pentagon spending on sushi. That's satire
None of Musk's posts on X since Dec. 10 include the word 'drug,' and his only two uses of the word 'test' in 2025 were in reference to his Starlink program. Additionally, there is no record of the supposed announcement on the official DOGE X account or its website.
More than 3 million people were employed by the federal government as of November 2024, according to the Pew Research Center. Any new mandate requiring that many people to comply within 30 days surely would have generated widespread coverage by legitimate media outlets, and the terms of the testing program would have been made public through official government channels. Yet there is no credible evidence of such an order from any official agencies, and there have been no reports about it from credible media organizations.
Jo McGuire, the executive director for the National Drug & Alcohol Screening Association – a trade group for the drug-testing industry – said she is unaware of the supposed requirement the post references. Her group has not been contacted about it, and none of its approximately 2,000 members, who come from 450 organizations and businesses, have made mention of it, she told USA TODAY.
The claim appears to have originated from a Feb. 1 X post Musk shared in response to a user's question about the possibility of a 'federal workforce-wide, mandatory, immediate drug test.' While Musk called it a 'great idea,' he made no mention of any formal announcement, a 30-day deadline or any details on how such a program would work.
Some – but not all – federal employees have long been subject to random drug testing, but that requirement predates by years the purported mandate from Musk, said Joe Reilly, a consultant and expert on drug testing in the workplace. Employees who carry firearms, operate motor vehicles with passengers, serve on flight crews as air traffic controllers or on railroad operating crews are among those in presumptive testing-designated positions, according to a Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration document.
USA TODAY previously debunked false claims that Musk banned LGBTQ+ Pride on X, threatened to suspend critics of the Trump administration from the platform and shared a post comparing the Make America Great Again political movement to Nazi Germany.
USA TODAY reached out to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and to several social media users who shared the claim but did not immediately receive any responses.
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