Musk says on X that feds must explain what they did last week or resign
All federal workers will shortly receive an email asking what they did last week – and that if employees fail to respond, it will be taken as a resignation, Elon Musk wrote in a post on X Saturday.
Musk wrote he was acting “consistent with President @realDonaldTrump’s instructions,” apparently referencing a social media post Trump shared earlier Saturday encouraging the billionaire to be harsher in his efforts to slash the federal workforce.
Trump posted on Saturday morning to Truth Social, his social media platform, commending Musk for doing “A GREAT JOB,” but adding, “I WOULD LIKE TO SEE HIM GET MORE AGGRESSIVE.”
Musk’s post to X came about seven hours later.
The posting comes after a difficult and chaotic two weeks for America’s 2.3 million federal employees, who saw tens of thousands of their probationary colleagues fired under a joint Musk and Trump bid to radically shrink the government, which is being spearheaded by Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service.
Many federal employees spent the past several days tearfully bidding farewell to colleagues or facing intense strain as they wondered whether their jobs, too, might be on the chopping block.
If the government decides to treat employees who don’t respond to the email as having resigned, that would be illegal, said Nick Bednar, a professor of law at the University of Minnesota, noting that federal law states that government employees’ resignations must be voluntary.
Previous case law before the Merit Systems Protection Board – the board that hears appeals of disciplinary actions against federal workers – has established what counts as voluntary, and the situation laid out in Musk’s post would not qualify, Bednar said.
The line, “What did you get done this week?” is a common Musk refrain – one which he famously asked Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal on the way to his eventual purchase of the site. (Musk fired Agrawal upon taking over).
After being appointed head of DOGE, in November, Musk hinted that he would ask federal workers the same question. “To: all@.gov,” he wrote on X, “What did you get done this week?”
He signed the message, “From: @DOGE.”
The question is meant evoke a demonstrable example of the value workers are adding. Within his companies, Musk presses his workers for examples of how they solved a specific problem – and aims to draw out details, an approach his deputies have now brought to the federal workforce.
In his November X post, Musk reposted a clip of tech investor Marc Andreessen breaking down the value of the question during appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast.
“In the context of Silicon Valley companies, that was a provocative statement,” Andreessen said. “Because a lot of Silicon Valley companies take months or years to do anything. But imagine that statement being applied to the government.”
“The analogy to this is I send you an email and I give you a day to respond or you owe me a million dollars,” Bednar said. “I can’t take that to court and say, well, they didn’t respond so they clearly accepted they were going to give me a million dollars.”