The government’s 2.2 million employees wonder if responses to the ‘What did you do last week?’ directive are mandatory . . . and if they’ll be fired.
Earlier Monday, we published my piece about this weekend’s farcical episode in which Elon Musk, in spearheading President Trump’s DOGE initiative to cut deadwood from the federal workforce, directed all 2.2 million employees to provide a brief synopsis — about five bullet points — on what each accomplished during the preceding week.
The directive was first watered down by the Office of Personnel Management, which removed Musk’s threat that noncompliance would be construed as a resignation from federal employment. Then it was countermanded by a number of senior Trump administration officials for a number of obvious reasons, including the likelihood that it could complicate court proceedings, compromise investigations, inadvertently reveal sensitive information (which could cause more lawsuits against the government), and be generally counterproductive to the missions of these agencies.
On the other hand, a number of departments and agencies instructed their employees to comply. This, naturally, caused confusion — especially when there followed more conflicting guidance from OPM that the directive was now deemed voluntary and that noncompliance would not be interpreted as resignation.
And the president himself waded in because . . . of course he did.
The Wall Street Journal reports that he was even more invested in Musk’s directive than previously known. The pair apparently spoke by phone before Musk posted the directive on X/Twitter — only after Trump’s post saying he wanted Musk to get “more aggressive.”
Today, as administration officials were scrambling and employees were already whipsawed by conflicting directives, the president took time out during his joint appearance with French President Emmanuel Macron to endorse Musk’s directive. The president said he thought the Musk-inspired “What did you do last week?” email sent to the workforce was “great because we have people that don’t show up to work, and nobody even knows if they work for the government.” This echoed Musk’s rationalization of the directive after the blowback started — which I related in today’s piece.
President Trump elaborated: “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.”
So, the state of play is . . . who knows?