Small Business Administration (SBA) administrator Kelly Loeffler rallied her employees back to the office after a "disappointing" debut last week when she arrived at a desolate workplace on her first full day at the agency. 

"There were tumbleweeds blowing through the office," Loeffler told Ainsley Earhardt during "Fox & Friends" on Tuesday. "There were still tags left on desk chairs, and it was my first full day at the agency. And I was so excited to be able to meet people and to not find anyone there was disappointing. To have 80% of the people back yesterday was amazing to be able to shake hands."

"What's happening is Americans are seeing that they have been paying for empty office buildings for do-nothing bureaucrats," she continued. "That ends now. We are going to get this federal government back to work, thanks to President Trump's return to work order, and we can expect no less of this administration. We're going to work hard to do that every day."

Loeffler went viral after she took a video showcasing empty SBA headquarters in Washington, D.C. on Friday, with no one in sight and vacant desks. 

She ultimately rallied 80% of her staff back to the office by Monday, a 60% jump from Friday, and just in time for President Donald Trump's back-to-office mandate to take effect. 

Meanwhile, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) sent an email titled, "What did you do last week?" to federal employees over the weekend, calling on them to submit five bullet points detailing their accomplishments over the past week or face possible termination.

Elon Musk, who has been working with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to curb wasteful government spending, warned those who did not comply with the ultimatum would be out of a job. 

"Consistent with President @realDonaldTrump’s instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week," Musk wrote on X on Saturday. "Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation."

That email ignited a firestorm among workers and critics alike, all while several agencies, including the Department of Defense and Federal Bureau of Investigation, responded to the request, telling their employees to ignore the OPM email.

"We just want to know, ‘Are there people there doing their jobs?’ And again, the bar is so low, it's laughable to think that we can't respond to an email and say, 'Here's the five things I did. Great. I'm on to the next thing,'" Loeffler said. "Small businesses do 500 things in a day. They want to know that we're here serving them."

"We should be able to talk about that very easily and then get on with the next task."

Musk confirmed shortly before Monday's deadline that federal workers would be given another chance to respond to the request, and that failure to do so "will result in termination," although the actual OPM email made no mention of any firings. 

"Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager," it read. 

DOGE’s work comes as President Donald Trump ordered the federal workforce to return to the office after five years of remote work stemming from the coronavirus pandemic, and has vowed to clean house of bad actors within the government and ax overspending.

Loeffler echoed the president's return-to-office mandate, and said in a memo outlining her day-one priorities that all non-exempt employees will report to work in person starting this week for five days a week. 

"The American people do not deserve an out-of-control bureaucracy that works from home over regulates them [and] goes after their political enemies," Loeffler said. "They want to know that people are working for them, so we're absolutely going to get that other 20% back to work, because we have been living under Joe Biden's America, in which he encouraged people to work from home."

"This was a bureaucracy that was not working for the American people," she continued. "It was out of control and unaccountable, and we're going to restore that accountability. And of course, there's going to be resistance. But if you resist, I would suggest to people to start looking for another job."

Fox News Digital’s Andrew Mark Miller, Greg Wehner, Emma Colton and Anders Hagstrom contributed to this report.