Elon Musk says he is giving federal employees a second chance to respond to his demand for a list of recent accomplishments and that failure to respond could result in termination.
The ultimatum will likely spark confusion since the Office of Personnel Management told agencies that a response about their weekly work product is voluntary and failure to do so would not be considered a resignation.
Mr. Musk barreled ahead in an online post late Monday.
“Subject to the discretion of the President, they will be given another chance,” Mr. Musk wrote. “Failure to respond a second time will result in termination.”
Mr. Musk, the billionaire CEO of SpaceX, Tesla and X, is swiftly cutting federal spending and payroll as head of the Department of Government Efficiency under President Trump.
He issued a justify-your-job directive over the weekend, soon after the president encouraged him to be more “aggressive” in his cost-cutting efforts.
OPM emailed federal employees shortly after Mr. Musk’s tweet with the subject line “What did you do last week?”
The directive sparked a lawsuit from unionized government workers and mass confusion at agencies, as some agency heads told workers to ignore the email and some said workers should comply.
Some commentators say listing your work tasks shouldn’t be that hard and is something that private-sector workers do. Yet workers say it is part of a pattern of harassment from Mr. Musk and responses will be used to slash their jobs or curtail their funding.
Mr. Trump said Mr. Musk’s directive was “great” and a good way to find out who was engaged on the job.
Yet workers say it is part of a pattern of harassment from Mr. Musk and responses will be used to slash their jobs or curtail their funding.
“It was nothing but a cynical attempt to demean federal workers and terrorize them into quitting,” said Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, a union for federal workers. “To be clear, federal employees report to the agencies who employ them through established chains of command. They do not report to OPM, ‘DOGE,’ and definitely not to Elon Musk.”
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• Tom Howell Jr. can be reached at thowell@washingtontimes.com.