- Federal workers over the weekend were asked to respond to an email with their accomplishments over the past week or risk losing their jobs. After several agencies pushed back, telling staff to ignore the email, Elon Musk, who’s leading the Department of Government Efficiency, doubled down on Monday evening, saying government employees “will be given another chance. Failure to respond a second time will result in termination.”
On Saturday, workers for the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) received an email with a subject line saying, “What did you do last week?” It asked federal workers to reply with five examples of what they accomplished over the past week and cc their supervisors—and if they did not respond by Monday at midnight, they’d risk losing their jobs.
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man who is leading the charge at Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), tweeted Saturday afternoon: “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”
This led to a wave of confusion, with several agencies—including the FBI, Pentagon, and State Department—directing their staff to simply ignore the email. According to an email obtained by The Hill, OPM even told its employees that responding is “voluntary” and “a non-response to the email does not equate to a resignation.”
As the deadline to respond to the email approached, Musk doubled down on Monday evening, saying “Subject to the discretion of the President, they will be given another chance. Failure to respond a second time will result in termination.”
In a separate post Monday, Musk responded to the backlash regarding the order.
“The email request was utterly trivial, as the standard for passing the test was to type some words and press send! Yet so many failed even that inane test, urged on in some cases by their managers. Have you ever witnessed such incompetence and contempt for how your taxes are being spent?”
Trump, for his part, lauded Musk’s efforts on Monday.
“There was a lot of genius in sending it,” Trump told reporters. “If people don’t respond, it’s very possible that there is no such person or they’re not working.”
One agency employee who spoke to NBC News and asked not to be named out of fear of reprisal said managers sending examples of model responses to the email “as empathy for their staff.”
Peter Harms, a professor at the University of Alabama’s Culverhouse College of Business, previously told Fortune’s Sasha Rogelberg asking employees to explain what they’re working on is not a terrible strategy as “workforces do this all the time.” Musk did something similar when he purchased Twitter, now called X, in 2022. But as Rogelberg noted, asking two million federal workers to even spend five minutes responding to an email like this could be very costly for the government.
