It doesn’t mean I can’t. It means I shouldn’t.
Elsewhere you have claimed this is stated in the article, despite the fact it doesn't state it in the article[1]. It's also already pretty well established that Elon bragged on his platform about "deleting" 18F long before sending out these messages to them and the rest of the federal government. So now you're moving the goalposts again to pretend that Elon's long-established desire to "delete" 18F actually amounts to justified dismissal for "insubordination"
If the best arguments you can muster for DOGE's actions are all in bad faith, perhaps DOGE is not doing a good job.
[1]the article merely notes that they received a second demand for standup updates mere hours before they were advised their entire department had been shut down, which if anything suggests DOGE isn't very good at coordinating what it's doing and that replying to those emails is pointless because you'll get fired anyway It also links to an article which confirms that they were fired because 18F "as been identified as part of this phase of GSA’s Reduction in Force (RIF) as non-critical", not for "insubordination:
This is all stuff DOGE is actually attacking, not hypothetical 100B NGO donation of which 95% had gone to politicians which they pointedly haven't discovered. Although given the current track record for "savings" they have published, if they did "discover it" we'd probably find that it was just an error in the output of their GPT-authored PDF scraper...