Federal workers began receiving emails Saturday asking them to describe what they did last week — as Elon Musk warned on social media that, if employees fail to respond, it will be taken as a resignation.
Musk wrote he was acting “consistent with President @realDonaldTrump’s instructions,” apparently referencing a social media post Trump shared earlier Saturday encouraging the billionaire to be harsher in his efforts to slash the federal workforce.
Trump posted on Saturday morning to Truth Social, his social media platform, commending Musk for doing “A GREAT JOB,” but adding, “I WOULD LIKE TO SEE HIM GET MORE AGGRESSIVE.”
Musk’s post to X came about seven hours later, and the emails began going out to federal employees close to 4:30 p.m. Eastern.
“Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager,” read the email, sent from the HR arm of the Office of Personnel Management with the heading, “What did you do last week?” according to a copy reviewed by The Washington Post. “Please do not send any classified information, links, or attachments.”
The deadline to reply, the email stated, is Monday at 11:59 p.m. Eastern. The email made no mention of Musk’s threat of enforced resignation.
McLaurine Pinover, spokesperson for the Office of Personnel Management, said in a statement Saturday evening that agency managers “will determine any next steps” after workers reply to the email.
“As part of the Trump Administration’s commitment to an efficient and accountable federal workforce, OPM is asking employees to provide a brief summary of what they did last week by the end of Monday, CC’ing their manager,” she wrote. “Agencies will determine any next steps.”
The email and its demands immediately raised a spate of legal and logistical questions for America’s 2.3 million federal employees, some of whom are prohibited from revealing information about their work to third parties without earning specific approvals. Others, for example in the Defense Department, are on duty tours in remote or inaccessible locations and cannot check their emails. And still others are on leave without any ability to log into government devices or emails — including scores of workers the Trump administration placed on administrative leave for their purported association with diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.
Adding to the chaos, leaders at some agencies swiftly began issuing guidance to their workers, telling them not to reply until further vetting of the email could be done, according to emails reviewed by The Post.
Tearful farewells
The message comes after a difficult and chaotic two weeks for federal employees, who saw tens of thousands of their probationary colleagues fired under a joint Musk and Trump bid to radically shrink the government spearheaded by Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service. Many federal employees spent the past several days tearfully bidding farewell to colleagues or facing intense strain as they wondered whether their jobs, too, might be on the chopping block.
“Most people have been scrambling trying to keep things going despite the existential threat of being fired every moment,” said one employee with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who, like others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. “I don’t know how we can keep up with this psychological terror.”
An employee at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said: “To me, it’s like saying, I burned your house down on Saturday, what household chores did you do this week?”
If the government decides to treat employees who don’t respond to the email as having resigned, that would be illegal, said Nick Bednar, a professor of law at the University of Minnesota, noting that federal law states that government employees’ resignations must be voluntary.
Previous case law before the Merit Systems Protection Board — the board that hears appeals of disciplinary actions against federal workers — has established what counts as voluntary, and the situation laid out in Musk’s post would not qualify, Bednar said.
“The analogy to this is I send you an email and I give you a day to respond or you owe me a million dollars,” Bednar said. “I can’t take that to court and say, well, they didn’t respond so they clearly accepted they were going to give me a million dollars.”
There’s also potential that the widespread request for information on federal employees’ work could violate federal law at some agencies, despite the email’s stipulation that no classified material could be shared, according to interviews with employees and lawyers.
The round of emails swiftly inspired defiance and anger from federal workers and some lawmakers. Some employees forwarded it to their managers explaining why they did not intend to reply, according to records obtained by The Post. Other leaders or supervisors told staffers not to respond to the message until receiving further guidance from their immediate leadership.
FBI employees began sending questions to their managers asking whether they would be fired for not making a list, and whether people on leave had a duty to reply and could accidentally be fired if they did not respond. Said one FBI worker: “This is really wearing people down.”
Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, the union that represents the largest number of federal workers, vowed to “challenge any unlawful terminations of our members and federal employees across the country.”
“It is cruel and disrespectful to hundreds of thousands of veterans who are wearing their second uniform in the civil service to be forced to justify their job duties to the this out-of-touch, privileged, unelected billionaire who has never performed one single hour of honest public service in his life,” Kelley said in a statement.
And New Jersey Senator Andy Kim (D) posted on X addressing federal employees, telling them “You deserve so much better” and writing he was “sorry you are being threatened.”
An old refrain
The line, “What did you get done this week?” is a common Musk refrain — one which he famously asked Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal on the way to his eventual purchase of the site. (Musk fired Agrawal upon taking over).
After being appointed head of DOGE in November, Musk hinted that he would ask federal workers the same question. “To: all@.gov,” he wrote on X, “What did you get done this week?”
He signed the message, “From: @DOGE.”
The question is meant evoke a demonstrable example of the value workers are adding. Within his companies, Musk presses his workers for examples of how they solved a specific problem — and aims to draw out details, an approach his deputies have now brought to the federal workforce.
In his November X post, Musk reposted a clip of tech investor Marc Andreessen breaking down the value of the question during appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast.
“In the context of Silicon Valley companies, that was a provocative statement,” Andreessen said. “Because a lot of Silicon Valley companies take months or years to do anything. But imagine that statement being applied to the government.”
Trump’s push for Musk to take a more aggressive approach to the federal workforce comes as numerous polls, including one conducted by The Post in partnership with Ipsos, show that Musk and Trump’s actions targeting the federal workforce are unpopular. Forty-nine percent of Americans disapprove of how Musk is handling his job, per The Post-Ipsos poll, while 34 percent approve and 14 percent are unsure.
As the emails spread across agencies, stunned employees tried to parse what it meant. The messages went to what appeared to be every single federal agency, as well as U.S. diplomats abroad, according to interviews with dozens of workers and records obtained by The Post.
The email immediately triggered a flurry of questions among U.S. diplomats within the Foreign Service to the State Department’s HR office and the union that represents diplomats, the American Foreign Service Association, about whether they are authorized or advised to respond.
Some employees forwarded the message to their managers to share displeasure and their intent not to comply. Others said they planned to wait until Monday to decide how to reply in consultation with managers and union representatives.
Still others planned to reply immediately to avoid any risk of losing their jobs. Some federal workers in group chats discussed sending memes or expletives in response.
And many reckoned with the latest hit in what feels like a swelling attack on all aspects of their jobs and lives.
One federal worker received the email after returning home from a brewery with her daughter, also a federal worker. Another employee got it at the dog park. A third received it as she logged on her email to send her terminated probationary employee a screenshot of her timecard, so she could use to show she was unlawfully fired while on maternity leave.
One federal worker, an employee with the Department of Labor, checked his email on the way to drop off his son at Boy Scouts.
“I don’t want to cuss right now,” he said of what he saw in his inbox, “but what the hell.”
