Staff at multiple federal agencies have been told to refrain from responding to an Elon Musk-ordered email from the Office of Personnel Management demanding they justify their usefulness or lose their job.
Employees across the federal government began receiving emails Saturday—with the subject line “What did you do last week”—that instructed them to provide a list of five accomplishments by midday Monday.
Musk—who heads up the federal spending task force DOGE—said in a tweet that “failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.” His team has been tasked by President Donald Trump with finding hundreds of billions in spending cuts by the middle of next year.
Among the agencies that told staff not to respond were the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Internal Revenue Service, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, according to ABC News.
Meanwhile, the Department of Defense told civilian employees to hold off on replying until they had received legal counsel, while the Departments of Energy and State instructed staff to ignore the request for now.
“The State Department will respond on behalf of the Department,” said Tibor Nagy, the acting Under Secretary of State for Management, in a Saturday e-mail to staff. “No employee is obligated to report their activities outside their Department chain of command.”
The leadership at multiple law enforcement agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, joined in the pushback against Musk’s demand.
“The FBI, through the Office of the Director, is in charge of all of our review processes, and will conduct reviews in accordance with FBI procedures,” said the bureau’s newly confirmed director Kash Patel, in a message to employees. “When and if further information is required, we will coordinate the responses.”
Even Tulsi Gabbard, the newly confirmed director of the office of national intelligence, told her staff not to respond to Musk’s directive, according to The New York Times.
“Given the inherently sensitive and classified nature of our work, I.C. employees should not respond to the OPM email,” Gabbard wrote in an email to intelligence officials.
The clash between Musk—Trump’s most powerful benefactor—and Patel—a longtime sycophant of the president who has written multiple children’s books depicting him as a jovial folk hero—was a nascent sign of “power struggles” within the administration, NBC News justice correspondent Ken Dilanian noted in a tweet.
The Musk-ordered OPM e-mail marks the latest escalation in the billionaire’s war on the federal bureaucracy, which has seen him task variously unqualified teen and twenty-something tech workers to try and access federal systems and help organize mass firings.
A judge ruled Thursday that the Trump administration could proceed with its purges of the bureaucratic ranks. DOGE has targeted tens of thousands of employees across the federal government for termination, focusing in particular on probationary workers who are easily fired.
