WASHINGTON, D.C. (Politico) — All federal government employees will have to share what they’ve been working on in the last week or face dismissal, Elon Musk said Saturday.
Musk posted on X that employees will be receiving an email “shortly” requesting to “understand what they got done last week.” A lack of response, Musk said, “will be taken as a resignation.”
The email — sent with the subject line “What did you do last week?” just two hours after Musk’s post, and shared with POLITICO — asks employees to please reply with “approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and CC your manager.”
It instructs employees to not send any classified information. The deadline for response: end of day Monday, just over two days from when it was sent. The email did not include any threats for punishment for those who don’t respond.
It’s unclear what legal authority, if any, Musk is relying on.
The announcement comes only hours after President Donald Trump took to Truth Social to applaud Musk on his work with the Department of Government Efficiency on reducing the size of the federal government — and pushed him to “get more aggressive.”
“REMEMBER, WE HAVE A COUNTRY TO SAVE,” Trump wrote.
Michael Fallings, an attorney specializing in federal employment law, told POLITICO the actions Musk described in the post would be illegal.
“I don’t believe it would be legal, and I don’t think he really understands right now how he will even do what he’s threatened to do,” Fallings said.
The email appears to have been sent broadly across the government. Employees in the State Department, the National Institute of Health, the General Services Administration, Veteran Affairs, the Food and Drug Administration and other agencies all received a copy.
What appears to be a government-wide audit of every employee’s work comes after weeks of the Trump administration slashing federal agencies and firing probationary employees across the government.
