US federal workers must justify job or risk dismissal, says Elon Musk

By Gregory Korte and Victoria Cavaliere

 

  The Trump administration began sending emails to more than 2 million federal workers on Saturday, asking them to report on what they did last week or be forced to resign. 

The directive was the latest salvo from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to the federal workforce.

 

An email obtained by Bloomberg asked federal employees to reply with five bullets of what they accomplished last week, copying their manager. Employees were asked to exclude any classified information, links or attachments. The deadline to respond is 11:59 p.m. in Washington on Monday.

 

In a social media post Saturday afternoon, Musk said the directive came at the behest of President Donald Trump.

 

“Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation,” Musk said.

 

His post didn’t address a myriad of legal and pragmatic complexities, and seemed to indicate the government could simply stop paying any number of federal workers, from the postal service to penitentiaries, if an email justification of their jobs wasn’t made.

 

As a special government employee and adviser to the president, Musk doesn’t have any direct power to fire federal employees. 

 

“Agencies will determine any next steps,” OPM spokeswoman McLaurine Pinover said.

 

Consistent with President @realDonaldTrump’s instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week.

 

The head of one federal employee union called the email “cruel and disrespectful” and said it would challenge any dismissals of members fired under the directive.

 

“Once again, Elon Musk and the Trump Administration have shown their utter disdain for federal employees and the critical services they provide to the American people,” said Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government employees, calling Musk an “out-of-touch, privileged, unelected billionaire who has never performed one single hour of honest public service in his life.”

 

The email came from the same hr@opm.gov email address used to send federal workers the “Fork in the Road” offer to pay their salaries through September if they volunteered to resign this month. 

 

About 75,000 federal employees took that offer, and since then many agencies have begun mass dismissals of probationary employees with less than one or two years of service.

 

‘Great Job’ 

His warning came shortly after Trump said in a social media message that “Elon is doing a great job, but I would like to see him get more aggressive.”

 

The question “What did you get done this week?” is one that Musk has asked employees of his companies. Before acquiring Twitter in 2022 and rebranding it as X, he texted that question to CEO Parag Agrawal — whom he later fired.

 

Trump created DOGE through a Jan. 20 executive order that reorganized an existing White House office, the US Digital Service, and gave the team the task of modernizing technology across government. He expanded its role in early February to include oversight of spending and personnel cuts to transform the federal workforce, reduce the size of the government and limit hiring to essential positions.

 

Musk has pledged that DOGE’s cost-cutting enterprise would provide “maximum transparency” and that “all of our actions are fully public.” The department says it has saved some $55 billion in federal spending so far, but this week its website accounted only for $16.6 billion of that. 

 

DOGE has sought to gain access to internal systems across several government agencies, sparking lawsuits over Trump’s legal and constitutional limits as president.

 

A federal judge this week denied a request from Democratic state attorneys general to temporarily block DOGE’s work. The Democrats contend that Musk is exercising power to reshape the US government that is supposed to be reserved for high-level, Senate-confirmed officials. 

 

The department has also reversed some of its firings and cuts, including to a health program for 9/11 first responders and survivors. And the Energy Department decided to bring back nuclear energy specialists after abruptly eliminating their jobs.