Key US departments within the Trump administration have told staff not to comply with a Saturday email from Elon Musk’s cost-cutting initiative asking what they accomplished in the past week.
The FBI, state department and Pentagon were among agencies that instructed employees not to answer the message. Other department heads advised staff to comply, while some told workers to wait for further guidance before responding.
Musk said failure to respond by Monday at midnight would be interpreted as the employee resigning. President Donald Trump has yet to comment on the email.
The conflicting guidance caused confusion for hundreds of thousands of government bureaucrats as Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) task force leads an outside effort to aggressively reduce government spending.
The message sent to millions of federal employees on Saturday evening came after Musk posted on his social media platform X that government staff would “shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week”.
In a copy of the email obtained by the BBC, employees were asked to respond explaining their accomplishments from the past week in five bullet points – without disclosing classified information.
The Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the federal government’s human resources agency, confirmed the email was authentic.
The message did not mention whether declining to comply could affect employment status, despite Musk’s social media assertion that “failure to respond will be taken as a resignation”.
Credit: bbc.com
