US government workers received an email on Saturday afternoon asking them to list their accomplishments from the past week or resign – the latest development in the Trump administration’s efforts to scale back the federal workforce.
The email came after Trump’s billionaire confidante Elon Musk posted on X that employees would “shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week”.
Musk, as the head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), has been leading an outside effort to aggressively curtail government spending through funding cuts and firings.
The email arrived in inboxes shortly after Trump spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference (Cpac). The messages came with the subject line “What did you do last week?” from a sender listed as HR.
The Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the federal government’s human resources agency, confirmed the email was authentic in a statement to CBS, the BBC’s US news partner.
In a copy of the email obtained by the BBC, employees were asked to explain their accomplishments from the past week in five bullet points – without disclosing classified information – before midnight on Monday.
The message did not mention whether a failure to respond would be considered a resignation.
The American Federation of Government Employees, the largest union representing federal employees, criticised the message as “cruel and disrespectful” and vowed to challenge any “unlawful terminations” of federal employees.
On Sunday morning, Musk wrote on his social media platform X that “a large number of responses have been received already”, adding: “These are the people who should be considered for promotion.”
Newly-confirmed FBI director Kash Patel told his employees in an email that they should “pause any responses” to the OPM memo.
Earlier in the day, Trump touted cuts and told a crowd of supporters at Cpac that the work of federal employees had been inadequate because some of them work remotely at least some of the time.
Elon Musk’s team has exacted wide-ranging changes to the US federal infrastructure through Doge and with approval from the White House.
Thousands of government employees at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the Pentagon and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), as well as other agencies, have been fired in recent weeks.
The email mirrors Musk’s handling of employees after he acquired social media platform Twitter, now called X, in 2022. As the staff there shrunk under his ownership, he issued ultimatums that included a now-infamous request to commit to being “extremely hardcore” at work or resign.
Trump has repeatedly applauded Musk’s government-cutting measures.
In a Truth Social post, Trump said that Musk is doing a “great job” in reducing the size of the federal government and that he would like to see him “get more aggressive” in the pursuit.
