Federal workers won’t lose their jobs after all if they fail to provide an email justifying five things they did last week, according to the latest topsy-turvy Trump Administration guidance.
And according to one internal agency email reviewed by DailyMail.com, employees were even being told that putting sensitive information in their response to Elon Musk’s demand for for the bullet-point email would be a security risk.
The stunning removal of the termination threat came just minutes after President Donald Trump suggested federal employees who didn’t respond to Musk‘s required email would, in fact, lose their jobs.
But despite the president’s own words, by Monday afternoon, federal employees were being told the Office of Personnel Management had ‘rescinded’ the ‘mandatory requirement’ which had federal employees on edge as a Monday midnight deadline was bearing down.
‘Assume that what you write will be read by malign foreign actors and tailor your response accordingly,’ said an internal message to Health and Services Department employees – in a clue that responding was a bad idea.
‘There is no HHS expectation that HHS employees respond to OPM and there is no impact to your employment with the agency if you choose not to respond,’ said the memo to a list that includes members of the National Institutes of Health, which has been hammered by cuts.
‘If people don’t respond, it’s very possible that there is no such person or they’re not working,’ President Donald Trump said while defending Musk’s post and the email to millions of federal workers
The new guidance came after OPM told agency HR chiefs the head HR offices of government departments they could ignore Musk’s demand and its termination threat – just days after the agency blasted out an email from ‘hr’ to 2 million federal workers.
The clashing guidance raised questions about who was making personnel decisions impacting millions of federal employees, Trump, Musk, or the agencies – and whether coordinating any of it in advance.
President Trump said Monday there was ‘a lot of genius’ behind Musk’s push to require every federal worker to submit five bullet points on what they did last week – and brandished the threat of firing people who don’t comply.
Musk’s move prompted the most pronounced flash of internal pushback against the DOGE head inside the Trump administration. New FBI Director Kash Patel and other agency heads had already told employees not to reply to the email.
The email from an HR address at the Office of Personnel Management began arriving in millions of federal employees’ mailboxes on Saturday, setting off uncertainty and conflicting statements from top officials.
Giving his backing on Monday, Trump said: ‘We’re trying to find out if people are working, and so we’re sending a letter to people: Please tell us what you did last week.
‘If people don’t respond, it’s very possible that there is no such person or they’re not working,. And then if you don’t answer, like you’re sort of semi-fired, or you’re fired, because a lot of people are not answering because they don’t even exist.’
Musk had posted on his X platform Saturday: ‘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.’
Trump appeared to back up Musk’s threat to fire people if they don’t comply.
Musk spent millions helping to get Trump elected and now heads the Department of Governmental Efficiency, which is combing agencies for data and pushing for firings to reduce the size of the bureacracy.
Health and Human Services employees were told to assume that ‘what you write will be read by malign foreign actors and tailor your response accordingly.’ That came after the FBI Director told his employees to hit pause amid concerns about sending classified information
The President also connected the issue to his plan to visit Fort Knox to inspect U.S. gold supplies, a probe also pushed by Musk.
‘Are we paying other people that aren’t working…Where’s the money gone? We have found hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud so far, and we’ve just started,’ he said.
‘We’re actually going to Fort Knox to see if the gold is there, because maybe somebody stole the gold – tons of gold,’ Trump said.
There is no evidence that the 147.3 million troy ounces of gold stored at the U.S. Bullion Depository in Fort Knox, Kentucky has been stolen,.
Trump’s Treasury secretary said last week there are annual audits, and there have been occasional high-profile visits.
Musk’s weekend email request rattled federal workers, who are already contending with firings of thousands of ‘provisional’ employees – those who joined the workforce in the last year or two who don’t have the same protections of more senior workers.
One Pentagon official called it ‘the silliest thing I’ve seen in 40 years’ and said it ‘completely usurps the chain of command.’
The email from the OPM did not contain the firing threat. ‘Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager,’ it said.
Adding still more confusion to the situation as a Monday midnight deadline approached, OPM told agency leaders that a failure to respond would not constitute resignation, the Hill reported.
Rep. Gerry Connolly, the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, called on OPM to clarify that failure to respond does not constitute resignation.
Must posted the email demand on Saturday, after a week when federal agencies fired thousands of provisional workers
Musk is also threatening to force out people who refuse to return to the office
The move drew pushback from employee unions
Musk’s email was titled ‘What did you do last week?’
The email came from the human resources department at OPM, but some federal workers tell DailyMail.com that not all of their colleagues have received the message
The billionaire Tesla founder revealed on Sunday he was simply eager ‘to see who had a pulse and two working neurons’ amid concerns that some government workers have it so good that they don’t even check their emails
‘This threat is illegal, reckless, and yet another example of the cruel and arbitrary chaos Mr. Musk is inflicting on the people’s government and its dedicated public servants,’ wrote Connolly, whose Virginia district includes many federal employees.
Patel told FBI employees to ‘pause any responses.’
Other agencies telling their workers not to respond include the State Department, the Dense Department, the National Security Agency, and others.
In contrast, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy published his own five-point list of accomplishments, after a week where a Delta flight had a fiery upside down crash landing in Toronto.
Trump himself appeared to carve out an exception for classified information, while papering over any tensions between agency heads and Musk.
‘That was done in a friendly manner – only things such as perhaps Marco [Rubio] at State Department, where they have very confidential things, or the FBI, where they’re working on confidential things. And they don’t mean that in any way combative with Elon. They’re just saying there are some people that you don’t want to really have them tell you what they’re working on last week. But other than that, I think everyone thought it was a pretty ingenious idea,’ Trump said.
