Elon Musk says he’s planning to give federal employees a second chance to respond to a dubious productivity email after members of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet told their departments to ignore it the first time.
“Subject to the discretion of the President, they will be given another chance. Failure to respond a second time will result in termination,” Musk wrote in a post on the social media platform X.
On Saturday, the Office of Personnel Management sent an email to millions of employees telling them to reply with “approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week” and to copy their managers. “Please do not send any classified information, links, or attachments. Deadline is this Monday at 11:59 pm EST,” the email said.
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It didn’t specify what would happen if employees didn’t answer.
That same day, Musk—who heads the nebulous government cost-cutting task force DOGE—announced on his social media platform X that, “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation,” a claim he has doubled down on despite pushback from federal officials.
Despite his claims, some members of Trump’s Cabinet told their employees not to respond, while other agencies said answering was optional.
“Given the inherently sensitive and classified nature of our work, I.C. employees should not respond to the OPM email,” Trump’s Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard wrote in an email to intelligence officials.
“The FBI, through the Office of the Director, is in charge of all of our review processes and will conduct reviews in accordance with FBI procedures,” FBI Director Kash Patel wrote to his employees, advising them to “pause” any responses.
The Department of Justice and State Department also told employees not to respond. Meanwhile, the Department of Agriculture and Department of Health and Human Services told employees that responding was voluntary, NBC News reported.
HHS also warned employees who did choose to respond to “assume that what you write will be read by malign foreign actors, and tailor your response accordingly,” according to an email obtained by NBC. Over the past few years, hackers from China and Russia have managed to access email accounts at the State Department and Department of Homeland Security.
As the Monday night deadline approached, the OPM itself clarified that responding to its email was voluntary, according to multiple news outlets. Despite the chaos and security concerns, Trump endorsed the productivity email during a press conference on Monday.
“I thought it was great,” he told reporters in the Oval Office. “We have people that don’t show up to work and nobody even knows if they work for the government, so by asking the question, ‘Tell us what you did this week,’ what he’s doing is saying, ‘Are you actually working?’”
But according to NBC News, the emails are not just a simple pass/fail test. In fact, the answers will be fed into an artificial intelligence system that will determine whether each job is “mission critical,” three separate sources told the network. That’s reportedly why employees were told not to include links or attachments in their responses.
The email’s legal status was challenged over the weekend as part of a lawsuit seeking to overturn DOGE’s purging of the civil service.
The plaintiffs in the case updated their complaint over the weekend to challenge the email, which was not signed by any government official and came from a generic hr@opm.gov email address that was created on the day Trump was sworn into office, the filing said.
The email did not cite any official OPM rule, policy or regulation, in violation of the law that created the agency, it argued.
Its legal status is further muddied by the fact that the White House has claimed in court filings that Musk is not actually in charge of DOGE and is just a “senior advisor to the president” who has “no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself.”
That didn’t stop Musk from insisting—in increasingly shrill terms—that federal employees respond to the email.
“The email test 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,” he wrote in a post on X. “Have you ever witnessed such INCOMPETENCE and CONTEMPT for how YOUR TAXES are being spent?”
Which begs the question of why, legal or not, federal employment would depend on an “utterly trivial” and “inane” test.
