Elon Musk needs to know what federal employees are doing.
On Saturday evening, the Division of Authorities Effectivity (DOGE) head tweeted: In step with President @realDonaldTrump’s directions, all federal staff will shortly obtain an e-mail requesting to grasp what they acquired performed final week.
“Failure to reply can be taken as a resignation,” he added.
An e-mail then went out throughout federal companies from the Workplace of Personnel Administration (OPM) with the topic line “What did you do final week”? It advised staff to “reply to this e-mail with approx. 5 bullets of what you achieved this week and cc your supervisor. Please don’t ship categorized info, hyperlinks, or attachments. Deadline is that this Monday at 11:59pmEST.”
Notably, the e-mail didn’t embody the specter of termination for not responding.
The e-mail has already acquired widespread backlash. The American Federation of Authorities Workers, a union representing federal employees, says the message is “merciless and disrespectful” and pledged to “problem any illegal terminations of our members and federal staff throughout the nation.”
“As soon as once more, Elon Musk and the Trump administration have proven their utter disdain for federal staff and the important providers they supply to the American folks,” Everett Kelley, union president, mentioned in an announcement.
Some authorities companies have already advised employees to not reply. In accordance with a letter obtained by The New York Instances, FBI Director Kash Patel advised staff: “When and if additional info is required, we are going to coordinate the responses. For now, please pause any responses.”
The State Division has reportedly offered related steering.
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The request additionally raises a myriad of questions. What about staff who’re on go away with out entry to their emails? Or those that work a shift the place they will not see the e-mail till after the deadline has handed? Who precisely can be sifting by way of the hundreds of thousands of emails and figuring out who did sufficient work for the week?
In the meantime, the e-mail’s unusual syntax reads like a phishing e-mail, prompting skepticism amongst some employees about opening or responding to the message. Others are encouraging non-government staff to spam the OPM e-mail with bogus lists.
On X, Musk is defending the emails. “To be clear, the bar could be very low right here. An e-mail with some bullet factors that make any sense in any respect is appropriate! Ought to take lower than 5 minutes to put in writing,” he claims. “This e-mail is a really primary pulse test,” he mentioned in one other tweet.
This morning, nevertheless, he is taking a more durable line and arguing that it is unacceptable for folks to not be checking emails on the weekend, and that the transfer is meant to cease fraud.
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“The rationale this issues is {that a} vital variety of people who find themselves speculated to be working for the federal government are doing so little work that they aren’t checking their e-mail in any respect!” he tweeted. “In some circumstances, we imagine non-existent folks or the identities of lifeless persons are getting used to gather paychecks. In different phrases, there’s outright fraud.”
He is made the identical false claims concerning the Social Safety Administration and different companies, however has to this point not produced any proof of fraud—solely spending on issues he would not like.
The e-mail is similar playbook Musk deployed when he took over Twitter in 2022. He requested that every one Twitter engineers bodily print out their final 30 to 60 days of code and present it to him, in accordance with Platformer, earlier than later backtracking on the request.
Just a few dozen Twitter engineers is an entire completely different ballgame from hundreds of thousands of federal staff whose jobs cowl all the pieces from forestry to nationwide safety.
DOGE is at present dealing with a number of authorized challenges as a part of makes an attempt to dam it from accessing techniques like these at Treasury IT, which comprise the non-public info of hundreds of thousands of Individuals. The DOGE web site, in the meantime, was so insecure that it was simply editable.
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