- An email from the Office of Personnel Management on Saturday asked federal workers to list their accomplishments from the week prior, part of Elon Musk’s efforts to assess government productivity. Management professor Peter Harms said the strategy, without a transparent purpose, could be a waste of time.
A directive to hold federal employees accountable for their weekly productivity could be taking up hundreds of thousands of hours of their workdays.
The Office of Personnel Management sent an email to all federal employees on Saturday asking them to list five bullet points describing what they accomplished in the past week, according to multiple reports. Elon Musk, who is spearheading the Department of Government Efficiency’s cost-cutting efforts, said on social media, “All federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week. Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”
If all 2 million federal workers spent five minutes responding to the email—about the time Musk said the task would require—the process would take 10 million minutes total, or more than 166,600 hours, Fortune calculated. Federal workers make an average of about $106,000 annually, or about $51 hourly for a 40-hour work week, according to OPM, meaning the time needed for all federal workers to reply to the email could cost the government about $8.5 million in wages—more than half of DOGE’s current $14.4 million budget.
OPM’s email aligns with President Donald Trump’s efforts to identify and eliminate alleged corruption within the bureaucracy of the federal government. The administration has called for the thinning of thousands of government jobs, primarily targeting probationary workers. Trump backed Musk’s intention to terminate workers who don’t respond, saying Monday they would be “semi-fired” because not responding to the email would indicate the workers did not have active accounts and therefore didn’t exist. OPM’s email to federal workers reportedly did not mention risk of termination.
Not all federal departments—including those run by Trump’s own appointees—have complied with Musk’s demand to respond to OPM’s email. Key agencies, including the Pentagon and FBI, have told employees not to respond to the email.
“The Department of Defense is responsible for reviewing the performance of its personnel and it will conduct any review in accordance with its own procedures,” Darin Selnick, who is performing the duties for the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, wrote on X.
Trump said agency heads who didn’t comply with the directive were only doing so to protect against sharing confidential records. “That was done in a friendly manner,” Trump said during a press conference on Monday while meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron. “They don’t mean that in any way combatively with Elon.”
The Department of Health and Human Services under Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was asked to comply with the email, but only after acting general counsel Sean Keveney told some employees not to respond.
“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 seen by the Associated Press.
Federal workers, many of whom have expressed dismay and frustration with DOGE’s fury of layoffs, reacted similarly. Some employees filed a lawsuit on Monday alleging the threat of widespread firings as a result of not responding to OPM’s email was “one of the most massive employment frauds in the history of this country.”
OPM did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
Are accountability emails effective management tools?
Though OPM’s correspondence has drawn backlash from employees and their managers alike, sending out an email asking employees what they’re working on is not inherently a bad management strategy, according to Peter Harms, a professor of management at the University of Alabama’s Culverhouse College of Business.
If OPM or DOGE is trying to conduct an analysis of the jobs of each government agency, asking employees about the tasks they engage in is an effective way to do this, he said. DOGE could likely quickly use machine learning or AI to aggregate and sort the responses into a large data set. Asking employees about their work is also a common human resources tactic used to inform future training or future job descriptions.
“To what degree do workforces do this to their employees? Workforces do this all the time,” Harms told Fortune.
But based on Musk’s track record at X of asking employees to justify their positions or risk getting fired, OPM’s email could serve a different and less effective purpose, Harms said. The directive mirrors Musk’s layoff playbook shortly after he purchased Twitter, now X, in 2022, when he asked employees to commit to “extremely hardcore” work conditions or resign. Given the similarities in strategies, Harms said OPM’s email could easily be interpreted as the equivalent of corporate downsizing.
For some employees, summarizing their jobs in five bullet points could be an unfair reflection of their work, Harms argued, particularly if they are only asked to capture short-term tasks and not the longer-term impact of their roles over the course of a month or year.
“You’ve got millions of federal employees, and they’re going to have to take some time out of their day to complete this, and most of what they do is fairly routine and probably pretty boring,” Harms said. “So just wasting this amount of time [replying to the email] is not that useful. That’s why we don’t do weekly performance reviews with our employees.”
If Musk wants to use accountability emails as an effective management or data collection tool in the future, he’ll need to focus on transparency and clarity to ensure it’s in the employees’ best interests, Harms suggested.
“I can see where it also causes frustration and fear,” he said. “But that’s not to say that this is completely illegitimate. It would be legitimate if it was better constructed and if it had a point.”
