Over the weekend, tech billionaire Elon Musk announced that federal employees would receive an email “requesting to understand what they got done last week.”
As you can imagine, there was severe blowback to Musk’s directive.
First, what was in the email?: It requested roughly five bullet points outlining their work accomplishments from the previous week. The deadline is midnight tonight, and “failure to respond will be taken as a resignation,” Musk wrote on X. It also instructed employees to include their manager on their email responses to the Office of Personnel Management address. Musk said it is meant to spot “outright fraud” from people who aren’t working.
A response may get you on Musk’s good side, apparently: Musk said that employees who have already sent in their five things email “should be considered for promotion.”
Several agencies are not having it: Agencies, such as the FBI (per FBI Director Kash Patel’s request), the State Department, the Defense Department and the intelligence community have instructed employees not to respond.
This raises the question: Does Musk have the power to order all federal employees to justify their employment to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a group backed by Trump but the limits of whose power is unclear? A group of federal employee unions is suing. A group of federal employee unions are suing.
Some reactions:
A GOP senator wants compassion in this process: “If I can say one thing to Elon Musk, it’s like, ‘Please put a dose of compassion in this. These are real people. [These] are real lives. These are mortgages,’” Sen. John Curtis (R-Utah) told CBS News’s “Face the Nation.”
Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) thinks it’s a ‘d---’ move: “This is the ultimate d‑‑‑ boss move from Musk – except he isn’t even the boss, he’s just a d‑‑‑,” Smith posted.
James Carville thinks the federal government will ‘collapse’: The Democratic strategist suggested the Trump administration will “collapse” in the next month as the public reacts to his far-reaching changes.
💡 Why this matters: This may signal the start of federal agencies breaking with Musk. His authority within the federal government has been debated, and many have criticized this move as a major overreach of power. Several agency heads have even stepped in to try to prevent Musk from elbowing his way in to undercut their authority. Who will win this standoff — Musk or the agency heads? And what happens to employees who do or do not sidestep their manager to comply with Musk?
Then there’s the logistics: Millions of people work for the federal government. While it’s unclear how many people work for the relatively small DOGE operation, it would be nearly impossible to sort through these responses and make proper informed hiring decisions.
Here's some food for thought: ProPublica noted that, “If DOGE is a federal agency, it can’t shield its records from the public. If it’s not an agency, then its tens of millions of dollars in funding weren’t legally allocated and should be returned, some contend.” 🔎 Read the analysis
📸 Trump posted a SpongeBob meme to troll federal workers
