Unelected bureaucrat Elon Musk spent his weekend pushing the federal workforce into further chaos, masterminding a bizarre email sent out through the Office of Personnel Management. The email, which was sent to virtually all civil federal workers, demanded “approx. five bullets” documenting what they had done during the week. While the heads of many federal agencies ultimately instructed their employees not to respond, Musk’s real aim immediately became clear: using the email as a way to troll those workers online—and to test just who would comply with his demands.
“How much time and energy has been wasted over this pointless fucking email?”
The new email bore significant similarities to the Musk-authored “Fork in the Road” email sent out weeks ago by OPM, which told employees to voluntarily resign or face layoffs. Like many Musk directives, it was sent outside work hours and normal channels, set an arbitrary deadline, and didn’t make clear how anyone would follow up on the information received. This weekend’s email went out on Saturday, and set a deadline of 11:59 EST on Monday night for workers to respond; while it told them not to send “classified information,” it contained no further detail on how their responses would be used, or even who would read them.
“It’s insulting on many fronts,” one federal worker who got the email told Mother Jones, and who said they wouldn’t respond unless expressly directed to by their agency’s leadership. Another person who works in intelligence told Mother Jones that any reply would violate their non-disclosure agreement.
On X, Musk made it abundantly clear that the real value of the email was seeing which employees would bend to his will, writing that failure to respond to the email “will be considered a resignation.” The text of the email did not contain this threat, meaning that federal employees would only have known their jobs were at risk if they are in the habit of browsing the hundreds of tweets Musk posts daily.
“This was basically a check to see if the employee had a pulse and was capable of replying to an email. This mess will get sorted out this week,” Musk wrote, explaining the move. “Lot of people in for a rude awakening and strong dose of reality. They don’t get it yet, but they will.”
Unlike the federal workers he spent the weekend spamming and threatening, though, Musk’s own job rests on questionable legal foundations. He does not have hiring or firing power over anyone, except perhaps the youthful employees serving in DOGE.
But Musk used the gigantic mess he himself had created with the email to paint federal workers as lazy and in need of a threatened mass-firing—a public relations goal that seemed to be baked in from the start.
“Many do not read their email at all,” Musk claimed, further criticizing federal workers. He also reshared a News Nation segment praising the email, adding, “Those who do not take this email seriously will soon be furthering their career elsewhere.”
Musk also shamelessly used the email to gin up engagement on X, the social media platform he owns, by, for instance, posting an unscientific vanity poll asking whether workers should have to respond, then using it to claim that “the public” was “overwhelmingly in favor” of the email. The email played as a chunk of red meat thrown to his real base: the right-wing X accounts he spends all day engaging with online. “This is exactly what I voted for,” enthused Chaya Raichik of the far-right account Libs of TikTok.
Multiple agencies asserted independence from Musk’s DOGE and its new influence over the OPM, directing their employees not to respond while they conducted internal reviews of the email. They included the Department of Defense, who also shared that guidance on X, and the FBI, whose newly-installed director, Trump loyalist Kash Patel, sent out an email telling them, “When and if further information is required, we will coordinate the responses.” Others waffled; as The Bulwark‘s Sam Stein reported, HHS, which is now led by anti-vaccine activist and energetic Trump booster Robert F. Kennedy Jr., initially told employees to respond before backtracking and telling them to “pause” those responses.
On Monday morning, federal workers at the Treasury Department, the Social Security Administration, and the General Services Administration told Mother Jones that they too had been instructed to respond to the email. In the case of Treasury, the directive telling staff to respond to the email was signed by John W. York, a former Heritage Foundation policy analyst; the email did not specify his job at the department.
Even with some federal agencies choosing to bend the knee, several federal workers told Mother Jones it was obvious that the larger goal had been to simply scare them and waste their time— something that didn’t work as well as Musk may have hoped.
Many employees simply forwarded the email to their managers and unions. The email has already been cited in an amended union-backed lawsuit filed against DOGE, which argued OPM had rolled out a “new mandatory reporting program” for federal workers, but hadn’t compiled with the procedures required to put one into place.
“No notice was published,” the amended complaint noted, “in the Federal Register or anywhere else, regarding any OPM program, rule, policy, or regulation requiring all federal employees to provide a report regarding their work to OPM.”
“Obviously, everything about DOGE is horseshit,” another federal worker told Mother Jones. “They aren’t actually concerned with ‘rooting out waste’ as much as they are with taking a sledgehammer to crucial agencies, but I can’t help but think about how much time and energy has been wasted over this pointless fucking email.”
