Despite widespread backlash, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has doubled down on asking federal workers for their weekly achievements.
The New York Times reports that new emails from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) landed in workers’ inboxes on Friday, asking them to provide bullet-point updates about their work on a weekly basis going forward. The messages, which came in with the subject line “What did you do last week? Part II,” said the reports are due every Monday night by 11:59 p.m. ET.
The fresh email wasn’t a carbon copy of the first, sent roughly a week ago. This time, an amendment tells employees who work exclusively on classified or sensitive activities to write “all of my activities are sensitive” as their response.
Musk initially argued that the emails are a simple task that anyone should be able to complete in minutes. He later pivoted to say the messages will help weed out fraud and dead or non-existent people who may be getting a government paycheck. President Trump has picked up on the latter talking point, too. Thus far, neither Musk nor Trump have provided evidence of this.
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White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters earlier this week that “more than 1 million workers” replied to DOGE’s original email, despite the federal workforce consisting of 2.4 million people, according to White House data. It’s unclear if the administration confirmed that the responses came from actual employees, given that people online claimed to have emailed the OPM email with bogus “what I did last week emails” to gum up the system.
On X, Musk said that people who don’t reply to the emails will be fired, though neither OPM email included that threat. (Trump seems to be unsure; “And it’s possible that a lot of those people will be actually fired,” he said last week.)
Many of the largest federal agencies, including the FBI, State Department, and Pentagon, instructed employees to ignore DOGE’s request, citing security. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has since told employees to respond, starting next week, DefenseScoop reports. “Non-compliance may lead to further review,” he wrote.
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On Thursday night, a federal judge ruled that OPM “does not have any authority whatsoever, under any statute — in the history of the universe — to hire and fire employees within another agency.”
Meanwhile, Senator Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) said the emails were sent to employees of legislative branch, despite them “not being subject to personnel actions by the executive branch.” This, he said, is proof of DOGE’s “uninformed, poorly executed, and chaotic manner.”
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About Will McCurdy
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