President Donald Trump on Monday endorsed an email sent by Elon Musk via the United States Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to federal workers on Friday afternoon asking them to reply with five bullets of what they accomplished last week.
“I thought it was great because we have people that don’t show up to work, and nobody even knows if they work for the government. So by asking the question, ‘Tell us what you did this week?’ What he’s doing is saying, ‘Are you actually working?’ And then, if you don’t answer, like you’re sort of semi-fired, or you’re fired because a lot of people are not answering because they don’t even exist,” Trump said during a press conference.
He added: “So I think it was actually — there was a lot of genius in sending it. We’re trying to find out if people are working, and so we’re sending a letter to people, ‘Please tell us what you did last week.’ If people don’t respond, it’s very possible that there is no such person or they’re not working.”
However, confusion about whether to respond to the email was still abounding as the deadline of Monday 11:59 p.m. ET approached.
Musk first announced the emails on Friday at 2:46 p.m. ET, saying that “failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”
He posted 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.
The emails prompted immediate panic across the federal workforce, according to a source, who said, “Holy shit storm Batman. Federal employees freaking out.”
The email also prompted confusion after some supervisors at some agencies, including at the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Health and Human Services, told their employees not to respond immediately to the email.
There was even more confusion after some top officials at some agencies told employees not to respond.
For example, State Department Acting Undersecretary for Management Tibor Nagy told employees in a statement they were not obligated to respond.
Later, FBI Director Kash Patel also told employees in a statement to “please pause any responses.” Then, Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness Darin Selnick told employees similarly to “please pause any response.”
On Monday morning, some agencies — such as the Department of Veterans Affairs — told employees the email was “valid.”
Asked about “a disconnect in communications,” Trump said, “No, no, no. And that was done in a friendly manner, only things such as perhaps Marco at State Department, where they have very confidential things, or the FBI, where they’re working on confidential things. And they don’t mean that in any way combatively with Elon. They’re just saying there are some people that you don’t want to really have them tell you what they’re working on last week. But other than that, I think everyone thought it was a pretty ingenious idea.”
He again endorsed the email, “We have to find out where these people are, who are they? And we said, If you don’t respond, we assume you’re not around and you’re not getting paid anymore, too. So, you know, we’re doing a real job. And we just had a poll come out, I guess, the Harvard poll saying that it’s massively popular what we’re doing.”
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