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Federal workers don’t have to answer Elon Musk-prompted emails outlining what they did in their job last week, despite the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) figure’s announcement that failure to do so would amount to resignation, The Post has learned.
Officials at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) notified human resource bosses across multiple agencies that responses to the emails — which were due at 11:59 p.m. ET Monday — were “voluntary,” according to a source familiar with the situation.
OPM also instructed multiple HR departments that failure to reply to the email did not mean automatic termination — despite the Tesla and Space X boss’ warning to the contrary.
After the email was blasted out on Saturday afternoon, Musk had written on X that “failure to respond will be taken as a resignation,” an ultimatum that was not mentioned in the weekend missive itself.
Multiple government agencies and departments had already instructed their employees not to reply to the demand for a list of five bullet points detailing what they achieved in the previous five working days.
Those included the Department of Defense, Department of Health and Human Services, FBI, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and National Security Agency, which told workers to hold off on any responses.
Some of those departments expressed concerns about keeping national security-related activity under wraps, though the email had instructed employees not to include classified material.
Prior to the updated OPM guidance, Tom Spiggle, a veteran labor and employment lawyer, told The Post that he expects the Trump administration to face stiff legal challenges if they attempt to fire federal employees for not responding to the email.
“[Federal workers] have Fifth Amendment due process rights, which is different from those of us in the private sector. And you can’t just fire them willy-nilly,” he argued. “You can fire them, but you have to follow certain procedures. And this is not one of them.”
“OPM clearly didn’t follow any rule-making process,” Spiggle added. “They don’t have authority to hire and fire workers outside of their agency, and so in order to be given that authority, there’d have to be a rule-making period, which didn’t happen here.”
An amended lawsuit filed in San Francisco federal court over OPM’s push to fire probationary federal workers cited Musk’s email blast in its effort to reverse the mass terminations and claimed that the Trump administration has not followed any of the standard procedures for dismissing workers under the Administrative Procedure Act.
“OPM has not complied with any procedural requirements,” the amended lawsuit noted. “At least some federal agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, began telling their employees not to respond to this OPM surprise request.”
President Trump had defended the Musk-directed effort hours before OPM’s new guidance circulated.
“I thought it was great because we have people that don’t show up to work and nobody even knows if they work for the government,” the president told reporters in the Oval Office Monday. “What he’s doing is saying ‘Are you actually working?’”
Critics, including some Democrats, have attempted to expose daylight between Trump and Musk, a strategy the president has taken note of and scoffed at.
Leading up to the “What you accomplished last week” email, Trump publicly encouraged Musk to get even “more aggressive” with his efforts to slash government bloat.
Amid the weekend firestorm following the emails going out, Trump posted a “SpongeBob SquarePants”-inspired meme mocking the outcry from federal employees over the tech tycoon’s demand.
Musk also suggested that government employees who replied early to the bullet-points email “should be considered for promotion.”
House Democrats had also bristled at Musk’s latest machination and penned a Monday letter to 24 agency and department heads Monday demanding they inform their workers that the Musk-directed email is “invalid.”
Spiggle questioned the wisdom of Musk’s approach to slash the federal workforce, calling the latest attempt “clownish.”
“It’s just not a serious effort,” he argued. “What federal agency sends out a mass email to every government employee on a Saturday, asking for a response by Monday at midnight?”
