US personnel office walks back email ultimatum from Musk to workers | Trump administration

The US government’s human resources office has walked back an ultimatum issued by Elon Musk that would have forced its workers to resign if they did not submit a bullet-point list of their recent accomplishments, in one of the first signs of internal pushback to the Tesla billionaire’s campaign to downsize the federal workforce.

The demand, made in an email sent to million of government employees over the weekend and quickly sued over by a coalition of labor and advocacy groups, represented the latest salvo by the “department of government efficiency” (Doge), the Trump-sanctioned cost-cutting initiative Musk chairs.

But in the days that followed, government departments gave their employees differing instructions as to whether they should respond to the message, and by Monday the office of personnel management (OPM), which manages the federal workforce, announced that responding to the email is not mandatory and that failing to do so by midnight would not be considered a resignation, as Musk had warned.

Musk, however, continued to insist that workers will be expected to respond or they will lose their jobs.

“Subject to the discretion of the president, they will be given another chance. Failure to respond a second time will result in termination,” Musk said on Monday afternoon.

Earlier in the day Donald Trump had spoken in support of the demand.

“By asking the question, tell us what you did this week, what he’s doing is saying, are you actually working?” the president said. “They’re trying to find out who’s working for the government, are we paying other people that aren’t working, and … where’s the money going.”

Musk on Saturday gave all the US government’s more than 2 million workers barely 48 hours to itemize their accomplishments in the past week in five bullet points. In a post on X, Musk indicated that “failure to respond will be taken as a resignation”.

The broad demand came after the OPM, one of the first offices Doge infiltrated following Trump’s inauguration, orchestrated the firings of probationary employees and those working on diversity initiatives, and offered deferred buyouts to workers across the government. This time, the ultimatum quickly ran into resistance, particularly in government offices that deal with law enforcement and national security matters.

The FBI’s new director, Trump loyalist Kash Patel, asked agents to “please pause any responses”, while at the homeland security department, employees were similarly informed that “no reporting action from you is needed at this time”. All employees at the Department of Defense, who now answer to the former Fox News host and Trump acolyte Pete Hegseth as defense secretary, were similarly ordered not to respond to the OPM’s missive.

Employees in other federal departments were told to await further orders or to simply ignore Musk’s edict. Workers in the Social Security Administration and the health and human services department were told to comply with the email, and CNN reported that the Department of Transportation ordered all its employees to respond to the Musk email by its deadline. That included air traffic controllers who are currently struggling with severe understaffing and a spate of recent accidents.

Unions and advocacy groups who were already suing over the mass firing of probationary employees quickly added Musk’s demand to their lawsuit, requesting that a judge prevent any retaliation against employees.

“This request, and the resulting confusion, is not just inappropriate – it is disruptive to essential government functions,” wrote Everett Kelley, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the largest federal union and one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, in a letter to the OPM’s acting director.

He warned that the demand pulled “federal employees away from their critical duties without regard for the consequences. As just two examples, a VA surgeon’s attention belongs in the operating room and an air traffic controller’s attention on keeping the skies safe, not on dealing with this unclear and unlawful distraction.”

Government workers who spoke to the Guardian described the email as the latest in a string of disruptive messages from the OPM that have created a siege mentality in offices nationwide.

“I’m a frontline supervisor and haven’t received any communication as to whether or how to evaluate this,” said a Department of Education employee, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation. At the US Forest Service, where thousands were dismissed last week, workers told the Guardian the email added new layers of fear and confusion, with no clear instructions on whether they needed to comply.

“I am afraid that if I answer wrong I will get fired,” said a forest service scientist, speaking on condition of anonymity.

James Jones, a North Carolina-based maintenance mechanic with the National Park Service and AFGE member, said he was on sick leave on Monday to take care of his son, but now had to decide whether to leave him and drive into his office to respond to the email.

“It makes me angry, but I was expecting it,” said Jones, who described the email as “another shenanigan” but said he did not think there would be repercussions for not responding.

Latisha Thompson, a social worker with the Department of Veterans Affairs and AFGE member, said the drumbeat of emails from OPM, including an attempt to coax federal workers to resign en masse, had undercut her productivity.

“This kind of onslaught of intimidation and bullying via email has caused me and my colleagues a lot of distress,” she said.

Lawmakers in Congress’s Republican majorities have mostly acquiesced over the past few weeks as Trump has appointed loyalists to key positions and attempted to dismantle entire agencies. But the latest salvo against federal workers prompted a rebuke from the Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski, who has a history of squabbles with Trump.

“Our public workforce deserves to be treated with dignity and respect for the unheralded jobs they perform. The absurd weekend email to justify their existence wasn’t it,” she wrote on X.

At least 20,000 federal workers have so far been fired by the Trump administration, most of them recent hires on probationary periods who lack employment protections. In addition, the White House claims that more than 75,000 employees have accepted its offer of deferred resignations.

Gabrielle Canon and Michael Sainato contributed reporting