Federal government employees were beginning to receive a second round of emails Friday demanding that they account for their past working week in five bullet-points — and this time they have to respond.
The latest emails are beginning to arrive seven days after a similar request from the Donald Trump administration’s Office of Personnel Management (OPM) sparked widespread chaos and confusion across Washington, D.C.
According to documents obtained by The Washington Post, responding to the new message will be mandatory, and completing a version of it could soon become a weekly task as Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) seek to drastically downsize the federal bureaucracy by slashing its spending and headcount.
Responses to the new emails and others that follow will also enable Musk and DOGE to assess whether agencies’ activities align with Trump’s own agenda and executive orders, the documents cited by the Post suggest.
The second iteration were expected to be sent from addresses associated with the chiefs of agency HR departments, rather than a blanket pan-government mailout from hr@opm.gov..
The eventual plan, it reports, is for agencies to compile Microsoft forms capturing the five-point answers they receive. The information gathered will go to department heads across the government but will not be released externally.
Last Saturday’s original email was sent out to more than 2 million government employees under the subject line: “What did you do last week?” and demanded that they justify their jobs.
Musk, who had hours earlier been encouraged by Trump in a post on Truth Social to “get more aggressive” in making cuts, promoted the strategy on his own social media platform, X, warning staff that failure to reply by a deadline of midnight on Monday would be interpreted as a resignation.
The approach met with a highly mixed response – even from Trump loyalists like Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard – with agencies including the FBI, the State Department and the Pentagon instructing their employees to simply ignore the message. Some of those who did submit answers took the opportunity to send in rude and offensive diatribes attacking Musk and DOGE.
The confusion was perhaps best summed up, inadvertently, by Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, who told his staff on Sunday: “Let me clarify: We will comply with this OPM request whether by replying or deciding not to reply.”
When the White House eventually directed agency heads that Musk’s order was not binding, the billionaire backed down, extending the deadline and leaving enforcement to the president’s discretion.
When he appeared at Trump’s first Cabinet meeting on Wednesday, Musk told the assembled secretaries that the email had been “misinterpreted as a performance review” when it was intended to be a “pulse-check review.”
“We think there are a number of people on the government payroll who are dead, which is probably why they can’t respond, and some people who are not real people,” he claimed.
Musk declined to be drawn into specifics on the prospect of mass firings but Trump himself interjected to say: “Those people are on the bubble. Maybe they’re going to be gone.”
Then, on Thursday, California District Judge William Alsup ordered OPM to temporarily rescind directives ordering the mass dismissal of probationary employees at federal agencies in a further setback for the administration’s cost-cutting drive.
“The Office of Personnel Management does not have any authority whatsoever under any statute in the history of the universe to hire and fire employees at another agency,” Judge Alsup said.
