Elon Musk has ordered US government staff to list what they have done at work in the past week – or risk being fired.
Federal workers received a three-line email asking for five bullet points summing up their achievements over the last seven days.
In a post on his social media site X, Musk wrote: ‘Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.’
It is the latest stage in the billionaire’s efforts to drastically shrink the government workforce through a course of mass sackings.
In a little over a month since Donald Trump returned to the White House, his team – named the Department of Government Efficiency, though it is not an official federal agency – has made sweeping cuts in several key bodies.
This weekend, the Department of Defence announced it would be laying off thousands of probationary workers as it seeks to slash its civilian workforce by up to 8 per cent.
According to the New York Times, the latest ultimatum from Musk was received by workers at the State Department, the FBI, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Veterans Affairs Department among several others.
It came in the form of an email from an account named HR, with the subject line: ‘What did you do last week?’
The brief message continues: ‘Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager.’
Recipients are told not to include any links, attachments or classified information, and are given a deadline of 11.59pm on Monday – meaning they had less than 48 hours to comply.
No mention is made of Musk’s social media threat that termination would be the consequence for not responding.
McLaurine Pinover, a spokesperson at the Office of Personnel Management, said individual agencies would decide how to proceed if workers have spent the last week on leave or holiday.
Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) union, argued the email demonstrates Trump and Musk’s ‘utter disdain’ for government workers.
He added: ‘It is cruel and disrespectful to hundreds of thousands of veterans who are wearing their second uniform in the civil service to be forced to justify their job duties to this out-of-touch, privileged, unelected billionaire who has never performed one single hour of honest public service in his life.’
There was some confusion among heads of government departments over the correct way to react to the extraordinary message.
CBS News reported that Kash Patel, the newly installed head of the FBI, told his workers to ‘pause any responses’ to the memo.
And Tibor Nagy of the State Department wrote in an email obtained by US media: ‘No employee is obligated to report their activities outside of their Department chain of command.’
Hundreds of thousands of employees are believed to be impacted by threats of dismissal from Musk’s team, often known by the acronym Doge.
In an appearance on the stage at right-wing conference CPAC on Friday, Musk swung around a chainsaw handed to him by Argentinian president Javier Milei.
He declared it the ‘chainsaw for bureaucracy’, and said ‘waste is pretty much everywhere’ in the US government.
On Saturday, Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar suggested he would emulate the work of Doge if he becomes the country’s leader.
He told his party’s conference: ‘As First Minister, I will respect every penny of your money.
‘And that’s why we will have our own Department of Government Efficiency to stop the waste, deliver value for money for you, the taxpayer.’
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