24-02-2025
The True Purpose of Elon Musk's Weekend Email Ultimatum to Federal Workers
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Elon Musk's siege of the federal government entered a new phase late Saturday afternoon, when he announced on X that federal workers would soon be receiving an email 'requesting to understand what they got done last week,' adding, quite ominously, 'Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.'
A few hours later, millions of federal workers received the promised email sent from the Office of Personnel Management account hr@ the same one Musk used to send his 'Fork in the Road' email back on Jan. 28.
The message asked workers to reply with '5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager,' giving them until Monday night to complete the task. The email further urged workers not to send classified information in their replies. Musk's threat from earlier was conspicuously absent.
The email was eerily similar to one Musk sent out shortly after buying Twitter, demanding that its software engineers email him a bullet-point summary of their code modifications and '10 screenshots of the most salient lines of code,' a directive that IT professionals at the time criticized as a uniquely bad way to assess code. The same could be said of Musk's latest email, which presses multitudes of federal employees across many fields of expertise to justify their jobs to a mysterious axe-wielding entity that couldn't possibly understand the work they all do.
Understandably, the email sparked immediate panic among federal workers over the next move that might come from Musk, who only days earlier had shown up onstage at the Conservative Political Action Conference wearing sunglasses, slurring his words, and wielding a 'chain saw for bureaucracy.' Musk, who is not funny, also used the appearance to complain about 'the left's sense of humor.'
It's unclear why Musk's 'Nonresponse equals resignation' threat doesn't also appear in the email, but one might plausibly speculate that an attorney intervened, given the Merit Systems Protection Board's unequivocal finding that a federal worker's resignation must be 'affirmative' and 'voluntary,' as a matter of 'fundamental fairness and due process.' Of course, the email also declined to even acknowledge Musk's widely published threat, guaranteeing no small amount of fear, loathing, and confusion among the recipients, a list that evidently includes federal judges and their clerks, and even the FBI, prompting Director Kash Patel to issue a message to his staff to 'pause' any response 'for now.'
Despite the email's instruction to withhold classified information, encouraging federal workers to describe their jobs in emails sent to Musk's untested private email server seems at best unwise, from a security and privacy standpoint. In a Privacy Impact Assessment dated Feb. 5, a week after Musk's Department of Government Efficiency team plugged in an untested email server, authors Riccardo Biasini and Greg Hogan, both of DOGE, essentially argued that there was no need to conduct a PIA for its 'Government-Wide Email System.' The reason DOGE's email server should be considered exempt is because the system would be used only for '(1) the names of federal employees, (2) their government email addresses, and (3) short, voluntary email responses' (emphasis mine). Biasini's and Hogan's retroactive justification for the use of the server accords with the way it was applied in the sending of the 'Fork in the Road' email, and the responses it anticipated. But Saturday night's email from OPM is 'voluntary' only if you ignore Musk's threat from earlier that day, and the responses it invites are open-ended. In other words, after retroactively manufacturing a basis for the legality of the email server, DOGE and Musk crossed over the line they themselves drew.
Federal agencies are already required, per 5 USC Section 4302, to establish appraisal systems to rate employees' performance. The agencies are constrained to use 'objective' standards and criteria appropriate to the particular employee being evaluated. The email from hr@ exists entirely outside this framework, starting with the fact that the OPM isn't an agency. As Kevin Owen, a partner at Gilbert Employment Law, explained to me, 'OPM has a limited mandate and oversight capacity—by design, it can't issue instructions to workers of the various agencies. Unless you work for OPM, you don't report to OPM.' Owen characterized the email as the 'least efficient thing they've done so far,' suggesting that Musk may have created litigation opportunities for plaintiffs' attorneys if workers can bill the time they spent responding to the email as overtime.
Yet, it seems certain that many federal employees will respond by the Monday night deadline. The National Institutes of Health sent an email informing its workers to 'read and respond per the instructions.' A similar order was sent out by Department of Agriculture management, according to a worker there. But the State Department and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration joined the FBI in telling its workers to pump the brakes. Space News reported that NASA struggled to come up with a unified response, ultimately advising workers to refrain from replying. The National Treasury Employees Union, which represents the Department of Health and Human Services and the Food and Drug Administration, strongly advised its members not to respond, noting the lack of coordination with the FDA and expressing concern about workers' rights and interests.
Musk himself appears to be conceding that the OPM email and his threat were a pretext, suggesting in a post Sunday morning that his purpose is to test bodies for a pulse. 'The reason this matters is that a significant number of people who are supposed to be working for the government are doing so little work that they are not checking their email at all!' He further claimed, without evidence, that 'non-existent people' or the 'identities of dead people' are being used to collect paychecks. Dead voters have long been a fixation for the right, no matter how often these claims are debunked, so it seems natural that these imaginary zombie voters would one day take government jobs.
A minor irony to Musk's dead-workers-collecting-paychecks claim is that Musk himself is apparently a legal ghost, heading, but not really heading, DOGE, a quasi-legal entity that is presently enjoying all the authority of a congressionally created federal agency without any of the reporting and transparency obligations. Compelling civil servants to answer to an unanswerable fourth branch of government, as Rep. Jamie Raskin puts it, seems not only unprecedented but uniquely un-American.
For Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget and the architect of Project 2025, the primary motivating factor behind his proposal to make it easier to fire federal workers is clearly malice, per his statement previewing his actions last year: 'We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected.' For Musk, a relative newcomer to far-right politics, it seems to be more about domination and the lulz, as the kids used to say.
More than one worker has used the term mind games to describe to me Musk's treatment of them. In playing these mind games, Musk is ignoring the rules of the game that the rest of the country has at least tried to follow for more than two centuries. Armed with the president's acquiescence and blessing, not to mention Congress' complicit silence, Musk is playing the federal government in God mode. He unlawfully repurposed and modified—colloquially, hacked—OPM using this unprecedented access to treat government workers as nonplayer characters, answerable to him above their agencies. Unfortunately for the remaining federal workers, who never signed up to take part in an eccentric billionaire's nihilistic simulation, these days are painfully real.
