Elon Musk desires to know what federal staff are doing.
On Saturday night time, the Division of Authorities Effectivity (DOGE) head tweeted: In step with President @realDonaldTrump’s directions, all federal workers will shortly obtain an e-mail requesting to know what they acquired carried out final week.
“Failure to reply can be taken as a resignation,” he added.
An email then went out throughout federal businesses from the Workplace of Personnel Administration (OPM) with the topic line “What did you do final week”? It informed workers to “reply to this e-mail with approx. 5 bullets of what you achieved this week and cc your supervisor. Please don’t ship categorized data, hyperlinks, or attachments. Deadline is that this Monday at 11:59pmEST.”
Notably, the e-mail didn’t embrace the specter of termination for not responding.
The e-mail has already obtained widespread backlash. The American Federation of Authorities Staff, a union representing federal staff, says the message is “merciless and disrespectful” and pledged to “problem any illegal terminations of our members and federal workers throughout the nation.”
“As soon as once more, Elon Musk and the Trump administration have proven their utter disdain for federal workers and the crucial providers they supply to the American individuals,” Everett Kelley, union president, mentioned in a press release.
Some authorities businesses have already informed staff to not reply. In accordance with a letter obtained by The New York Occasions, FBI Director Kash Patel informed workers: “When and if additional data is required, we are going to coordinate the responses. For now, please pause any responses.”
The State Division has reportedly offered related steering.
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The request additionally raises a myriad of questions. What about workers who’re on go away with out entry to their emails? Or those that work a shift the place they will not see the e-mail till after the deadline has handed? Who precisely can be sifting by the hundreds of thousands of emails and figuring out who did sufficient work for the week?
In the meantime, the e-mail’s unusual syntax reads like a phishing email, prompting skepticism amongst some staff about opening or responding to the message. Others are encouraging non-government workers to spam the OPM e-mail with bogus lists.
On X, Musk is defending the emails. “To be clear, the bar could be very low right here. An e-mail with some bullet factors that make any sense in any respect is suitable! Ought to take lower than 5 minutes to jot down,” he claims. “This e-mail is a really primary pulse verify,” he mentioned in one other tweet.
This morning, nevertheless, he is taking a more durable line and arguing that it is unacceptable for individuals to not be checking emails on the weekend, and that the transfer is meant to cease fraud.
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“The explanation this issues is {that a} vital variety of people who find themselves purported to be working for the federal government are doing so little work that they don’t seem to be checking their e-mail in any respect!” he tweeted. “In some instances, we imagine non-existent individuals or the identities of lifeless individuals are getting used to gather paychecks. In different phrases, there’s outright fraud.”
He is made the identical false claims concerning the Social Safety Administration and different businesses, however has to date not produced any proof of fraud—solely spending on issues he does not like.
The e-mail is identical playbook Musk deployed when he took over Twitter in 2022. He requested that each one Twitter engineers bodily print out their final 30 to 60 days of code and present it to him, according to Platformer, earlier than later backtracking on the request.
Just a few dozen Twitter engineers is an entire totally different ballgame from hundreds of thousands of federal workers whose jobs cowl all the pieces from forestry to nationwide safety.
DOGE is at the moment dealing with a number of authorized challenges as a part of makes an attempt to dam it from accessing programs like these at Treasury IT, which contain the personal information of hundreds of thousands of People. The DOGE web site, in the meantime, was so insecure that it was easily editable.
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About Will McCurdy
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