All federal government employees will have to share what they’ve been working on in the last week or face dismissal, Elon Musk said Saturday.
Musk posted on X that employees will be receiving an email “shortly” requesting to “understand what they got done last week.” A lack of response, Musk said, “will be taken as a resignation.”
The email — sent with the subject line “What did you do last week?” just two hours after Musk’s post, and shared with POLITICO — asks employees to please reply with “approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and CC your manager.”
It instructs employees to not send any classified information. The deadline for response: end of day Monday, just over two days from when it was sent. The email did not include any threats for punishment for those who don’t respond.
It’s unclear what legal authority, if any, Musk is relying on.
The announcement comes only hours after President Donald Trump took to Truth Social to applaud Musk on his work with the Department of Government Efficiency on reducing the size of the federal government — and pushed him to “get more aggressive.”
“REMEMBER, WE HAVE A COUNTRY TO SAVE,” Trump wrote.
Michael Fallings, an attorney specializing in federal employment law, told POLITICO the actions Musk described in the post would be illegal.
“I don’t believe it would be legal, and I don’t think he really understands right now how he will even do what he’s threatened to do,” Fallings said.
The email appears to have been sent broadly across the government. Employees in the State Department, the National Institute of Health, the General Services Administration, Veteran Affairs, the Food and Drug Administration and other agencies all received a copy.
What appears to be a government-wide audit of every employee’s work comes after weeks of the Trump administration slashing federal agencies and firing probationary employees across the government.
After the Office of Personnel Management sent out a deferred resignation offer to federal employees — the now-famous “Fork in the Road” email — over 77,000 employees accepted offers to leave, the White House has said, cutting out 3 percent of the government workforce.
DOGE then swiftly moved to coordinate firing thousands of employees across different agencies, from the Department of Energy to the General Services Administration, in a more direct move to shrink the workforce by targeting those in a “probationary” period.
Trump got a win this week in federal court after a judge allowed Musk to continue accessing data and orchestrating mass layoffs.
The president then signed an executive order last Tuesday for agencies to work with DOGE to make “preparations to initiate large-scale reductions in force.”
More firings are on the way: The Pentagon announced Friday its plans to fire 5,400 employees, and other agencies have also indicated they’re continuing to look for cuts.
Spokespeople for the White House and DOGE did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Musk’s Saturday post.
Fallings — the employment lawyer — recommended that federal employees who receive the email should speak with their supervisor and respond based on the instructions. He cautioned that this could be especially difficult for employees who are on approved leave or do not have access to their email.
The American Federation of Government Employees, the union that represents workers across the federal government, slammed Musk and Trump for “their utter disdain for federal employees” and promised to challenge any “unlawful terminations.”
“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 the this out-of-touch, privileged, unelected billionaire who has never performed one single hour of honest public service in his life,” AFGE National President Everett Kelley said in a statement.
And federal employees across the government reacted with fury about the dictate from Musk. A Department of Justice official, granted anonymity to avoid retribution, noted that the email was labeled as coming from an “external,” server, adding they “cannot legally respond to this” because they handle classified material.
“This email looks exactly like all of the phishing email examples that federal employees see in training over and over again,” a Commerce Department employee, similarly granted anonymity, said. “I’m not responding to it.”
Dissent from Democratic lawmakers has already started pouring in, calling for employees to reject the move from Musk. Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.) said Musk has “no authority” to do what he’s claiming. “This is a good opportunity for mass civil disobedience,” Casten wrote on X.
Targeting federal employees for dismissal has only been a part of Trump and Musk’s plans to remake the federal government. The pair have targeted programs that promote diversity, equity and inclusion.
And Trump signed sweeping executive orders that look to order a review of all government regulations and bring independent agencies under control of the White House.
Congressional Republicans have been back-channeling with the Trump administration, concerned about how the cuts might affect public safety and health jobs, POLITICO reported Thursday.
Now, it’s possible that more employees are at risk of Musk’s chainsaw to the government.
One manager at the GSA, who spoke to POLITICO on condition of anonymity, said that Musk’s move seems like a tactic into scaring people to quit.
It will work, he said.
“Legal or illegal, they are hellbent on skirting every rule and misinterpreting every regulation they can to fire people like it’s a company,” the manager told POLITICO. “They are clearly panicked. They can’t fire people as easily as you could at a private company, and after the probationary purge, they need new ways to sort out how.”
Daniel Lippman, Dasha Burns, Halley Toosi and Paul McLeary contributed to this report.