Federal workers and agencies push back against Elon Musk’s email ultimatum

WASHINGTON — An Elon Musk ultimatum demanding that federal workers report what they had accomplished last week or lose their jobs is facing pushback leading up to a midnight deadline to respond.

A coalition of unions and groups that have been fighting the Trump administration’s mass layoffs of probationary workers amended its lawsuit against the U.S. Office of Personnel Management over the weekend to allege that the OPM email directing workers to justify their workweek was unlawful.

The OPM emails were sent out Saturday, shortly after Musk wrote in a post on X that “all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week. Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”

The OPM email did not mention the resignation threat, but said: “Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager. Please do not send any classified information, links, or attachments. Deadline is this Monday at 11:59pm EST.”

The lawsuit charges that the administration didn’t follow proper procedure for such an order and should be voided by a judge.

“The mass firings ordered by OPM are illegal and betray the trust of countless federal employees. The patronizing demand that federal workers still on the job have to justify themselves by enumerating five accomplishments just adds insult to injury. That too is against the law,” lawyer Norm Eisen said in a statement on behalf of the plaintiffs.

Musk has been tasked with reducing the size of the government by President Donald Trump, and the email is seen as part of his push to reduce the federal workforce by as much as 10 percent.

Some agencies, including ones led by close Trump allies, have told their employees to ignore the directive.

Justice Department employees were informed Monday that they did not need to respond to the message, according to emails seen by NBC News. “Due to the confidential and sensitive nature of the Department’s work, DOJ employees do not need to respond to the email from OPM. If you have already responded to this email, no further action is needed,” read one email sent by Assistant Attorney General for Administration Jolene Ann Lauria.

FBI Director Kash Patel instructed employees over the weekend to “pause any responses” to the email, and said his agency would do its own review. Employees of the State Department, the National Institutes of Health, the Defense Department, the National Security Agency and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence were also told not to respond to the email.

Officials at the Health and Human Services Department and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services directed employees to respond by the deadline

An email sent to Department of Transportation employees and obtained by NBC News instructed them to respond to OPM’s weekend email asking for five bullet points of their work. The message also asked employees to exclude any classified info from their responses. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy embraced the challenge himself in a post on social media.

Musk appears to be following the same playbook he used when he bought Twitter, which he renamed X.

Musk began his tenure there with massive layoffs, asking employees to commit to “Extremely hardcore” work in an email titled “A Fork in the Road” or be fired. The email subject line is the same as the email sent out to federal employees by the Office of Personnel Management offering buyouts in January. About 75,000 federal employees took the deal.

Twitter employees who stayed were then asked to print out pages of code they’d written from the last month and prepare to present the work to Musk personally. The code reviews reportedly were abandoned, and instead managers were asked to rank their employees, according to The Verge.

Musk and DOGE’s access to government data and information has become a central point of friction between the group and its critics. In at least 11 lawsuits, plaintiffs have argued that DOGE has flouted laws and rules around data and privacy. Some of the lawsuits have referenced allegations that DOGE is using artificial intelligence to analyze and process government data. The Washington Post reported in February that DOGE was using artificial intelligence to analyze spending at the Education Department, citing two people familiar with the project.