Multiple senior officials within the Trump administration told employees not to respond to Trump advisor Elon Musk’s order over the weekend, which instructed federal government employees to justify their positions by reporting “what they got done last week.”
By Sunday afternoon, however, the Defense Department, Homeland Security Department, State Department, FBI, and Office of the Director of National Intelligence told employees to hold off on responding to Musk’s directive, The Washington Post reported. An email from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) sent out on Saturday told federal government employees to “reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager.”
“Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation,” Musk warned in a post on X on Saturday. OPM’s email did not threaten termination, according to The New York Times.
Federal employees received the email hours after President Donald Trump praised Musk in a post on Truth Social and called on him to “GET MORE AGGRESSIVE.” Trump has set Musk, along with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project’s employees, loose on numerous federal agencies as the administration pushes for significant government cuts.
Experts have warned that federal workers in