Billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk emailed federal workers asking them to list what they had done last week.
Published On 23 Feb 2025
Several US federal agencies told employees not to respond to a demand by President Donald Trump’s adviser Elon Musk to list their accomplishments in the last week or be fired.
Federal agencies gave the memo on Sunday, a day after Musk’s team sent an email to hundreds of thousands of federal employees giving them about 48 hours to issue their reports.
Musk leads the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which in the first weeks of Trump’s administration has laid off more than 20,000 workers and offered buyouts to another 75,000, across large segments of the United States government.
Following Musk’s move, Trump administration-appointed officials at the FBI and State Department sent their staff emails telling them not to respond outside their chains of command, in a possible sign of tension between allies of the Republican president and the world’s richest person in his campaign to cut down the government’s 2.3 million member civilian workforce.
“The FBI, through the office of the director, is in charge of all our review processes,” said FBI Director Kash Patel, a Trump appointee, in an email to staff seen by the Reuters news agency.
Federal workers on Saturday evening received an email instructing them to detail the work they did during the previous week by 11: 59 p.m. ET on Monday (05: 00 GMT Tuesday), shortly after Musk posted on his X social media site that failing to respond would be taken as a resignation.
The subject of the email read, “What did you do last week?” and came from a human resources address in the Office of Personnel Management, but did not include Musk’s threat of termination.
Workers at the departments of Homeland Security, Education and Commerce, as well as at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the National Institutes of Health and the Internal Revenue Service also received guidance urging them not to respond, according t