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A message from Elon Musk asserting that federal employees will be given “a second chance” to respond to his ultimatum that they justify their jobs or risk termination is likely to spark another round of confusion across the U.S. government on Tuesday.
Confusion and Contradictions
Musk’s warning on X, the social media site he owns, came after Trump administration officials told federal workers they did not have to respond to his weekend email asking them to summarize their accomplishments of the past week. Failure to reply would be considered a resignation, Musk had claimed.
But while some federal agencies such as the U.S. Treasury Department told their workers to comply, others like the Pentagon did not. As Musk’s Monday midnight deadline approached, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management ultimately told agencies their workers could ignore the email.
Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX who has been tasked by President Donald Trump to lead a radical downsizing of the federal government, seemed undeterred.
“Subject to the discretion of the president, they will be given another chance. Failure to respond a second time will result in termination,” he wrote on X late on Monday.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment on Musk’s remarks. Prior to the new OPM guidance, Trump told reporters on Monday that workers who did not respond would be “sort of semi-fired,” adding to the uncertainty.
Musk’s downsizing initiative, executed by his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has led to the layoff of more than 20,000 workers. The administration has separately offered buyouts to 75,000 employees.
The vast majority of terminations have involved “probationary employees,” who started their positions less than a year ago and thus enjoy fewer legal job protections than the career civil servants who make up most of the 2.3 million-strong federal workforce.
But OPM has begun firing career workers within its own agency in a rapid-fire process that sources told Reuters is intended to serve as a template for a second round of mass layoffs across the government.
OPM has moved unusually quickly in an effort to demonstrate to other agencies what can be done, one source said.
Musk’s Authority And New Fissures In Trump Administration
Musk’s email threat and the pushback he saw from federal agencies cracked open new fissures within Trump’s nascent administration and raised questions about the limits of Musk’s authority.
Even after OPM’s guidance, which urged employees not to share classified or sensitive information in responding to Musk, some agency officials still nudged their employees to answer the email.
The head of the Small Business Administration, Kelly Loeffler, backed Musk’s email requirement in a Fox News interview on Tuesday.
“We just want to know: Are there people there doing their jobs? And again, the bar is so low it’s laughable,” Loeffler said. “I look forward to making sure that we get all the responses back, and for those that we don’t, we’ll have decisions to make.”
A senior manager at the General Services Administration, which manages federal buildings, told employees that the agency was still encouraging workers to respond even though it was voluntary, according to a GSA source.
Similarly, the acting director of OPM itself sent an email to the agency’s staff that said responding with bullet points was voluntary “but strongly encouraged.”
Meanwhile, the Department of Health and Human Services advised employees that if they chose to reply, they should keep their responses general in nature and refrain from identifying specific drugs or contracts they are working on, according to an email reviewed by Reuters.
“Assume that what you write will be read by malign foreign actors and tailor your response accordingly,” the email said.
Musk’s slash-and-burn approach has rippled into the wider U.S. economy as well, forcing companies that do business with the government to lay off workers and defer payments to vendors.
Legal Challenges and Wider Economic Effects
Since taking office on January 20, Trump has frozen billions of dollars in foreign assistance and effectively dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, which administers some 60% of U.S. foreign assistance, stranding medicine and food in warehouses.
In some cases, the government has scrambled to rehire workers who perform critical functions like nuclear weapons oversight and bird flu response.
On Monday, a group of labor unions that have asked a federal judge to stop the mass firings updated their lawsuit to request that Musk’s threatening email be ruled illegal.
At the same time, a federal judge blocked the DOGE team from accessing sensitive data maintained by the Education Department and the OPM.
Unlike Cabinet appointees and appointees to head up independent federal agencies, Musk’s appointment required no approval by the U.S. Senate.
(Reporting by James Oliphant; Additional reporting by Joseph Ax and Susan Heavey; Editing by Michael Perry and Nick Zieminski)
