Elon Musk is once again leaving his fingerprints on official communications from the federal government. In an email to staff Saturday afternoon, the Office of Personnel Management, which is stacked with Musk loyalists, told employees to send five bullet points detailing what they accomplished last week and cc their manager. “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation,” Musk wrote on X.
The move comes after President Trump announced that he wants Musk to be more forceful. “ELON IS DOING A GREAT JOB, BUT I WOULD LIKE TO SEE HIM GET MORE AGGRESSIVE,” he wrote on Truth Social. “REMEMBER, WE HAVE A COUNTRY TO SAVE, BUT ULTIMATELY, TO MAKE GREATER THAN EVER BEFORE. MAGA!”
“Will do, Mr. President!” Musk replied in a post on X.
The memo, which closely resembles a note Musk sent to Twitter staff in June 2023, specifies that employees should not include classified information, links, or attachments in their responses. WIRED has confirmed that employees at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Internal Revenue Service, National Institutes of Health, and Federal Aviation Administration, which all deal in classified information, received similar notices. The deadline to reply is Monday at 11:59pm EST.
“They’re proving that their only goal is not efficiency but to dismantle democracy by traumatizing federal workers,” says a current federal employee who asked to remain anonymous as they aren’t authorized to speak publicly about their agency. “They see this as a video game where they level up every time they hurt or eliminate a federal worker.”
In recent weeks, the Trump administration has laid off thousands of probationary employees who’ve been in the federal government for just one or two years. The cuts initially hit hundreds of people working on nuclear security as well as veterans and Department of Agriculture employees who are trying to stave off a bird flu pandemic. The so-called Department of Government Efficiency has also effectively frozen or otherwise attempted to dismantle the United States Agency for International Development and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
It is not clear whether OPM has the authority to force federal workers to resign if they do not respond to the email. “I don’t know that anybody can assess what’s legal right now because the agencies that are supposed to act as watchdogs are being dismantled,” says Laurie Burgess, an attorney who has represented a number of Twitter and SpaceX employees in labor disputes. She noted that she has cases set to be heard before the National Labor Relations Board this spring and does not feel confident that the board will still exist by that deadline.
In January, OPM sent federal workers an email with the subject line “Fork in the Road,” mirroring a note Musk sent to Twitter staff in November 2022. OPM told employees to return to the office five days a week, and that the government will employ people who are “reliable, loyal, trustworthy, and who strive for excellence.” Those who did not wish to comply were given a deferred resignation offer, which the White House has said that about 75,000 federal workers accepted.
Despite all outward appearances that Musk is running his so-called agency, the White House says he is not actually the DOGE administrator. Technically, Musk is a senior advisor. “Like other senior White House advisors, Mr. Musk has no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself,” wrote the director of the White House Office of Administration in a sworn statement.
The subject line of the email to federal workers (“What did you do last week?”) echoes a text that Elon Musk sent to former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal in April 2022. At the time, Musk was considering joining the Twitter board, but his relationship with Agrawal was starting to fray. After the CEO reprimanded him for asking his followers if they thought Twitter was dying, Musk snapped back: “What did you get done this week? I’m not joining the board. This is a waste of time. Will make an offer to take Twitter private.”
On Saturday, Musk doubled down on that years-old dispute. “Parag got nothing done,” he posted on X. “Parag was fired.”
Additional reporting by Aarian Marshall and Emily Mullin.
