Union representing Spokane VA workers accuses Trump administration of ‘psychological warfare’ after Musk asks workers to justify their jobs

WASHINGTON – An email arrived in the inboxes of workers at Spokane’s Mann-Grandstaff VA Medical Center and employees across the federal government on Saturday afternoon with a seemingly simple request from the Office of Personnel Management.

“What did you do last week?” the subject line asked the more than 2 million people who work for the federal government. Each employee, it said, should reply “with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week” and copy their manager.

The email didn’t say what would happen to someone who failed to reply by the deadline, Monday at 8:59 p.m. Pacific. Instead, the answer came in a post on X from Elon Musk, the social media platform’s owner, the world’s richest man and an adviser to President Donald Trump: “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”

By Monday night, after Trump endorsed Musk’s gambit and praised it as “genius,” administration officials backtracked and said the request was “voluntary.”

The demand set off more chaos across the federal workforce over the weekend, the latest in a series of sudden moves implemented by Musk since Trump gave the billionaire virtually unprecedented access to federal agencies – including those that have paid Musk’s companies billions through government contracts – ostensibly to search for wasteful and fraudulent spending. At Spokane’s VA hospital, which has struggled to hire and retain the staff needed to care for Inland Northwest veterans after being chosen as the testing ground for a flawed computer system, it raised the specter of more job losses.

The heads of some government agencies told their workers to ignore the email, but at Mann-Grandstaff, Director Robert Fischer emailed employees to say the request was “legitimate” and, in a subsequent email also obtained by The Spokesman-Review, to say that he had “received no further guidance” related to the original email from OPM, which functions as a sort of human resources department for the federal government.

“Please do not read too much into this simple request,” Fischer wrote. “There will likely be millions of responses to this email. Perhaps Artificial Intelligence will be used to identify patterns of work in the various agencies.”

At the White House on Monday, Trump supported Musk’s sudden demand, which made no exception for employees who didn’t have access to their email Monday nor for the workers at the VA and other agencies who were exempted from Musk’s earlier waves of mass termination because their jobs were deemed essential.

“I thought it was great, because we have people that don’t show up for work and nobody even knows if they work for the government,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Monday. “And then if you don’t answer, like, you’re sort of semi-fired or you’re fired.”

In a hearing before a House subcommittee on Monday about the rollout of the electronic health record system the VA began testing in Spokane in 2020, the head of the program told lawmakers that his team – which is tasked with fixing the problems that have contributed to thousands of cases of patient harm according to the VA’s own data – had lost about eight employees in the mass firing of probationary workers with relatively short tenures in their current jobs, plus another 16 people who had accepted offers to quit and be paid through September.

Unions that represent employees at the VA and other federal agencies reacted swiftly to Musk’s demand. The National Federal of Federal Employees, whose Local 1641 represents workers at Mann-Grandstaff, said in a statement that the ultimatum is “illegal and amounts to disrespectful psychological warfare.”

“This is a crisis you did not create, but one you unfortunately have had to endure,” said Randy Erwin, NFFE’s national president, before recommending that employees comply with the email if they hadn’t received guidance from their supervisors.

“This is a welcome opportunity to shine a light on your achievements and highlight the value of your work,” Erwin wrote. “Unfortunately, we know the intent of the original sender was not to learn about the great work you all are doing. But that doesn’t stop us from collectively creating an honest record of solid work performance as we fill up the OPM mailbox.”