Federal employees told to justify jobs in email or Musk says they face dismissal
In President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s latest move targeting the federal workforce, employees began receiving emails Saturday asking them to explain what work they did last week, as Musk announced that “failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”
“Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager. Please do not send any classified information, links, or attachments,” reads the email, which comes from the Office of Personnel Management’s HR email address but has no signature.
The email’s subject line reads: “What did you do last week?” CNN has obtained copies of emails sent to federal employees in multiple agencies. Many were sent with high importance or red exclamation marks.
The email blast came on the heels of a social media post by Musk threatening the jobs of workers who do not comply.
“Consistent with President @realDonaldTrump’s instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week,” Musk posted Saturday on X, hours after Trump suggested he be more “aggressive.”
However, the email itself does not state that failure to answer will be taken as resignation. It says the deadline for submission is Monday at 11:59 p.m. ET.
The email sent shockwaves through a federal workforce already reeling from an array of orders from the Trump administration, including the recent termination of thousands of employees on probationary status, a deferred resignation offer that many viewed as questionable and a requirement to return to the office full-time, among others.
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One president of a union chapter started getting texts from concerned members “nonstop” following Musk’s post and the OPM email.
“I don’t have any clue what in the world that email means either,” the union official told CNN, noting they are telling members to “just stand by until I advise otherwise.”
The Monday deadline also raises questions about what happens to workers who are on vacation or sick leave, the official noted. “Are they subject to termination because they are not available to respond?”
Other workers have told CNN that they do classified work that they cannot divulge in an email or don’t have access to computers all the time, which could cause them to miss the deadline.
Another head of a union chapter told worried members not to respond to the email until Monday and to await further guidance from the union.
The head of a top union representing federal workers lambasted Musk’s ultimatum, telling CNN in a statement that it reflects the Trump administration’s “utter disdain for federal employees and the critical services they provide to the American people.”
“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 this out-of-touch, privileged, unelected billionaire who has never performed one single hour of honest public service in his life,” said Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents more than 800,000 federal workers.
Kelley said his union plans to take legal action to “challenge any unlawful terminations of our members and federal employees.”
Two other federal employee unions — the National Treasury Employees Union and the National Federation of Federal Employees — did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
One federal worker told CNN that they find the demand “insulting” and “absolutely mind-blowing,” especially considering their activity at work is already tracked.
“It’s callous and calculating and just another low-down tactic to get rid of employees they haven’t been able to touch yet,” the worker said of Musk’s post saying a non-response would be considered a resignation.
Another federal staffer told CNN that they feel compelled to reply.
“Personally, I’m afraid to not respond by the deadline based on Elon’s tweets that non-response would be considered a resignation,” said the worker, who noted that their friends at another agency “are on the fence on whether to respond with actual accomplishments or to respond with bullets of the oath we took to the Constitution.”
Shortly after Musk’s post, Trump called the X owner a “patriot” and said he was “doing a great job” during remarks at the Conservative Political Action Conference.
Trump has tapped Musk to reshape the federal government with his Department of Government Efficiency. But whether Musk’s latest move is legal is unclear.
CNN has reached out to the White House for comment.
Musk’s comments follow a post from Trump on Saturday morning suggesting he’d like to see the tech billionaire get more aggressive.
“ELON IS DOING A GREAT JOB, BUT I WOULD LIKE TO SEE HIM GET MORE AGGRESSIVE. REMEMBER, WE HAVE A COUNTRY TO SAVE, BUT ULTIMATELY, TO MAKE GREATER THAN EVER BEFORE. MAGA!” Trump’s post read. Musk replied, “Will do, Mr. President!” in his own post.
The emails come as Musk and Trump seek to reshape the federal workforce — including reducing its size, replacing career workers with political appointees, wiping away some civil service protections, ending diversity efforts and more.
This story has been updated with new reporting.
CNN’s Betsy Klein contributed to this report.
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What Just Happened: Musk-OPM Send Email to Federal Employees Asking for Five Accomplishments
by Nicholas Bednar
February 22, 2025
Administrative Law, Civil service, Elon Musk, executive branch, Executive Orders, Government Workforce, OPM, Trump administration second term, United States (US)
On Saturday, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) sent an email to federal employees instructing them to respond with five things they accomplished last week. Elon Musk posted that an employee’s non-response would be considered a resignation. Here’s what happened and the concerns it raises, including its clear violation of civil service protections.
On Feb. 22, Musk—a current White House advisor, special government employee, and de facto leader of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—posted the following on X:
Consistent with President @realDonaldTrump’s instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week.
Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.
Approximately two hours later, federal employees received an email from OPM with the subject line “What did you do last week?”:
Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager.
Please do not send any classified information, links, or attachments.
Deadline is this Monday at 11:59pmEST.
The email did not repeat Musk’s threat equating a non-response to a resignation. Nor did the email provide any consequences about what would happen if employees missed the Monday evening deadline. Screenshots sent by some anonymous federal employees showed that the email was marked as “suspicious.” Other anonymous federal employees reported they had not received the email, but it was unclear whether OPM intentionally excluded these employees. What’s more, some individuals outside the executive branch reportedly received the email, including at least one federal judge and some law clerks. Some agencies have reportedly told employees to “pause on any responses” as of this writing.
The email follows a pattern of Musk borrowing tactics from the private sector in his efforts to shrink the federal workforce. Following his acquisition of Twitter in 2022, Musk instructed Twitter’s engineers to “email [him] a bullet point summary of what your code commits have achieved in the past ~6 months, along with up to 10 screenshots of the most salient lines of code.”
This is not the first OPM email to echo Musk’s takeover of Twitter. On Jan. 28, federal employees received an email with the subject line “Fork in the Road.” That email announced a “deferred resignation” program that promised to place employees on administrative leave with full pay and benefits until Sept. 30. Despite significant concerns over the program’s legality, a federal judge allowed the program to go forward, finding that employees would need to exhaust their administrative remedies with either the Federal Labor Relations Authority or the Merit Systems Protection Board before suing in federal court.
The OPM email does not specify how the agency intends to use the information it collects from employees. One possibility is that OPM intends for agencies to use this data to implement Executive Order 14210. Executive Order 14210 instructs agency heads to “develop a data-driven plan, in consultation with its DOGE Team Lead, to ensure new career appointment hires are in highest-need areas.” The Director of OPM is in charge of overseeing the creation of these plans. The same executive order instructs agency heads to initiate “large-scale reductions in force (RIFs).” RIFs are governed by specific rules, which require the agency to classify employees and remove them based on their order of tenure. It is possible that agencies may use the data collected from these emails to make retention and removal decisions. Yet these emails alone would be an insufficient basis for an RIF because the process requires significantly more information about the functions performed by each employee.
More broadly, the email raises concerns about the efficacy of the Trump administration’s efforts to cut the federal workforce. Five bullet points describing one work week—a week that included a federal holiday—cannot capture the importance of the work performed by most federal employees. And it certainly cannot capture the functions of those federal employees already placed on administrative leave, who were explicitly prohibited from performing their job duties during the week in question.
In essence, it appears that the Trump administration is demanding that employees justify their positions. But to date, the administration has done a consistently poor job of determining which positions are, in fact, important. Its poor-track record is evidenced by agencies’ efforts to recall fired probationary employees after realizing they perform crucial functions, such as managing the nuclear stockpile and the power grid or those working on responses to bird flu. Meaningful reorganization of the federal workforce requires more than five bullet points; it requires a holistic evaluation of how federal programs operate.
In the abstract, probably. Section 4302 of Title 5 requires agencies to develop “one of more performance appraisal systems which . . . provide for periodic appraisals of job performance of employees.” Agencies must provide a performance rating for each employee. Indeed, OPM recommends that agencies continually monitor employees during the performance period to evaluate whether employees are meeting expectations. Of course, the fact that this particular email came from OPM—and not the employing agency—suggests that this email is not actually part of any agency’s performance-management efforts.
Although the email instructs employees not to send classified information, the broad request for information from OPM has raised concerns that some employees may accidentally violate the standard procedures governing the handling of such information. Indeed, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Defense have reportedly instructed employees to wait for further instruction before responding to the email.
No. The resignation of a federal employee must be voluntary. The Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) has stated that “[t]he touchstone of the analysis of whether a retirement or resignation is voluntary is whether the employee made an informed choice. A decision made ‘with blinders on,’ based on misinformation or lack of information, cannot be binding as a matter of fundamental fairness and due process.”
A non-response to an email—especially an email with a deadline of one business day—does not evidence a “choice.” Moreover, a resignation must be requested by the employee—not the employer. The MSPB has jurisdiction to consider whether a resignation was, in fact, voluntary. I fully anticipate that the MSPB would not classify a removal pursuant to this email as a “voluntary resignation.” Were the Board somehow to fail to do so, the federal courts would likely overturn that decision.
Moreover, classifying a non-response as a resignation seeks to evade the civil service protections for performance-based firings. The MSPB lacks jurisdiction over issues arising from voluntary resignations except for determining whether the resignation was, in fact, voluntary. Yet employees removed from their position by the agency enjoy certain due process protections. The agency must provide notice and an opportunity for the employee to respond. The employee may then challenge their removal before the MSPB. The Trump administration cannot deprive employees of their due process rights through loopholes.
In sum, the administration’s use of private-sector tactics does not comply with federal law. Nevertheless, the administration continues to succeed at eroding morale within the federal workforce. (Which, for some, may be the point.) Resignations and layoffs will continue—whether lawful or not. Judicial intervention may come too late to reverse the damage done to state capacity. Ordinary Americans depend on that capacity to provide them with the comforts, and indeed to meet the basic needs, of modern living – from food safety to air traffic control to our national defense. Attacks on the federal civil service create a less safe and less comfortable existence for us all.
Editor’s note: This piece is part of the Collection: Just Security’s Coverage of the Trump Administration’s Executive Actions
by Nicholas Bednar
Feb 22nd, 2025
by Adam Cox, Pamela Karlan, Marty Lederman, Trevor Morrison and Cristina Rodríguez
Feb 19th, 2025
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Feb 18th, 2025
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Aug 26th, 2024
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Sep 19th, 2024
by Just Security
Feb 14th, 2025
by Gwendolyn Whidden
Nov 19th, 2024
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Nicholas Bednar (Bluesky – LinkedIn – X) is Associate Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota Law School.
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Nicholas Bednar
Is the email intended to be used for a reduction in force or other employee terminations?
Does an agency have the legal authority to demand that employees provide updates on their performance?
Could an agency treat an employee’s failure to respond to the OPM email as a resignation?
* * *
IMAGE: Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk delivers remarks alongside U.S. President Donald Trump during an executive order signing in the Oval Office at the White House on February 11, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
List accomplishments or resign, Doge tell US federal workers in email
US government workers received an email on Saturday afternoon asking them to list their accomplishments from the past week or resign – the latest development in the Trump administration’s efforts targeting the federal workforce.
The email came after billionaire Trump confidante Elon Musk tweeted that employees would “shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week”.
“Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation,” he wrote.
Musk has been leading an outside effort to aggressively curtail government spending through funding cuts and firings.
The email arrived in inboxes shortly after Trump spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference (Cpac). The messages came with the subject line “What did you do last week?” from a sender listed as HR.
In a copy of the email obtained by the BBC, employees were asked to explain their accomplishments from the past week in five bullet points – without disclosing classified information – before midnight on Monday.
The Office of Personnel Management, the federal government’s human resources agency, confirmed the emails were authentic in a statement to CBS, the BBC’s US news partner.
“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. Agencies will determine any next steps.”
The American Federation of Government Employees, the largest union representing federal employees, criticised the message as “cruel and disrespectful” and vowed to challenge any “unlawful terminations” of federal employees.
“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,” Everett Kelley, union president, said in a statement.
Earlier in the day, Trump touted cuts and told a crowd of supporters at Cpac that the work of federal employees had been inadequate because some of them work remotely at least some of the time.
“We’re removing all of the unnecessary, incompetent and corrupt bureaucrats from the federal workforce,” the president told the crowd at the annual conference in suburban Washington on Saturday afternoon.
“We want to make government smaller, more efficient,” he added. “We want to keep the best people, and we’re not going to keep the worst people.”
The Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) is not an official government department, but Musk’s team has exacted wide-ranging changes to the US federal infrastructure, with approval from the White House.
Thousands of government employees at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the Pentagon and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), as well as other agencies, have been fired in recent weeks.
The email mirrors Musk’s handling of employees after he acquired social media platform Twitter in 2022. As the staff there shrunk under his ownership, he issued ultimatums that included a now-infamous request to commit to being “extremely hardcore” at work or resign.
Trump has repeatedly applauded Musk’s government-cutting measures.
In a Truth Social post, Trump said that Musk is doing a “great job” in reducing the size of the federal government and that he would like to see him “get more aggressive” in the pursuit.
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