Elon Musk wants to know what federal workers are doing.
On Saturday night, the head of the Government Efficiency Department (DOGE) on Twitter: In accordance with the guidelines of the President @realdonaldtrump, all federal employees will soon receive an email seeking to understand what they did last week.
“Failure will be taken as resignation,” he added.
An email then came out through federal agencies from the Personnel Management Office (OPM) with the topic “Did you do last week”? He told the employees to “respond to this email with about 5 bullets of what you have done this week and your manager CC. Please do not send classified information, links or attachments. The deadline is Monday at 11:59 pmest.”
In particular, the email did not include the threat of finishing not to respond.
The email has already received widespread feedback. The US Federation of Government employees, a union representing federal workers, says the message is “cruel and disrespectful” and pledged to “challenge any illegal conclusion of our members and federal employees across the country”.
“Once again, Elon Musk and the Trump administration have shown their full contempt for federal employees and critical services they offer to the American people,” said Everett Kelley, president of the union, in a statement.
Some government agencies have already told workers not to respond. According to a letter taken from New York TimesThe FBI director, Kash Patel said to the employees: “When and if further information is required, we will coordinate the answers. For now, please stop any answers. “
The State Department is said to have given similar instructions.
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The request also raises a number of questions. What about employees who are on rest without access to their e -mail? Or those who work a change where they will not see the email until the deadline has expired? Who exactly will you see in millions of emails and determining who did enough work for the week?
Meanwhile, the strange email syntax reads as a phishing email, causing skepticism among some workers for opening or responding to the message. Others are encouraging non -governmental employees to spam OPM with false lists.
On X, Musk is protecting email. “To be clear, the bar is very low here. An email with a few bullets that make sense is acceptable! It must take less than 5 minutes to write,” he claims. “This email is a very basic control of the pulse,” he said in another tweet.
This morning, however, he is taking a more difficult line and arguing that it is unacceptable for people not to control email at the weekend, and that the mass is intended to stop the fraud.
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“The reason it matters is that a significant number of people who are supposed to work for the government are doing so little work that they are not controlling their email at all!” He tweetled on Twitter. “In some cases, we believe that non-existent people or the identity of deceased people are used to collect checks. In other words, there is complete fraud.”
He has made the same false claims about the Social Security Administration and other agencies, but so far has not produced any evidence of fraud – only expenses for things he dislikes.
The email is the same music of the playbook set when he took over Twitter in 2022. He demanded that all Twitter engineers physically printed physically from the last 30 to 60 days of the code and tell him, according to the platform, before to return later to the request.
Some Twitter engineers on Twitter are a completely different ball of millions of federal employees whose jobs cover everything, from forestry to national security.
Doge is currently facing some legal challenges as part of efforts to block it from accessing systems such as those in the Treasury, which contain the personal information of millions of Americans. The Dome’s website, meanwhile, was so unsafe that it was easily edited.
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About Will McCurdy
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