Fresh Musk emails to workers lead to renewed chaos at federal agencies

Elon Musk is trying again on his demand that every federal worker justify their employment weekly. And again, the hastily executed initiative is sowing confusion and resistance throughout the workforce, with many agency heads openly defying it.

A second round of emails instructing more than 2 million workers to reply with bullet points listing five things they accomplished over the week, which Musk calls a “pulse check,” came a week after the billionaire charged with executing President Donald Trump’s cost-cutting directives warned those who did not respond to an identical order last weekend that it would be taken as a resignation.

Late Friday and into Saturday, the second round of pushback had already begun at a handful of agencies. Some resistance came from officials at the highest levels.

NASA acting administrator Janet Petro wrote Friday night to staff warning them that “government-wide communications may reach you before we receive clear implementation guidance,” according to a copy of her message reviewed by the Washington Post. If workers receive another such communication over the weekend, they should ignore it, Petro wrote.

“Please give yourself a moment, and when you’re back on duty, check in with your supervisor or other agency leader before taking action,” Petro wrote. “Ultimately, we want to reduce your stress and provide clarity as we work through these requests together.”

The State Department likewise sent a brief note early Saturday telling staff to do nothing with the email. “Department leadership will continue to respond on the behalf of our workforce,” read a message obtained by the Post and sent at 7:35 a.m., signed by Tibor P. Nagy, undersecretary for management at State.

The billionaire’s threat last weekend was scuttled by agency leadership concerns over the legality of the directive, dangers that classified and otherwise sensitive government operations would be compromised by it and its alienation of mission-critical employees needed to implement an aggressive Trump policy agenda.

Musk, however, is doubling down on his effort, addressing what employees doing classified work can say.

“The President has made it clear that this is mandatory for the executive branch,” Musk wrote on X on Saturday morning. “Anyone working on classified or other sensitive matters is still required to respond if they receive the email, but can simply reply that their work is sensitive.”

The post invoked Trump’s support days after Musk, who is not a Cabinet official but rather what’s called a special government employee, was invited by the president to detail his cost-cutting efforts during his first Cabinet meeting of the term on Wednesday. Trump praised the billionaire during it, signaling support for the measures that have rattled some of the agency heads at the table.

Even so, guidance telling workers to ignore the emails came from across the chain of command – from managers, supervisors or other department leaders who did not wait for instructions from agency heads.

At least one ambassador put out guidance on Friday night, hours before Nagy sent his note, telling staff not to respond, according to an email reviewed by the Post. Also on Friday, an official within one division of the Energy Department wrote to staff members telling them not to respond to any emails asking what they accomplished last week.

The department has not issued an all-agency response, according to several employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

“This is a power struggle,” one Energy Department worker said, describing the latest flurry of emails and counter-emails.

The last guidance on the DOGE emails that department officials received from their leadership, on Monday, instructs: “Per the Secretary’s guidance, please do not respond, if you have not already done so.”

It also assures there will be no repercussions for ignoring the “bullet point” directive.

Employees at the department said their Trump-appointed leadership appears to be growing exhausted by the haphazard DOGE directives, as the confusion they are creating diverts workers’ attention and agency resources away from the task of implementing the president’s far-reaching orders to gut climate programs, cut clean energy subsidies and enable more fossil fuel production. The employees said the emails, arriving late Friday night and over the weekend, appear designed to rattle and demoralize workers.

“It does give off ‘psychological warfare’ vibes to send these when they know folks would be heading to bed, or cooking dinner, on weekends in particular,” one employee said.

The Trump administration had been planning to transfer the latest distribution of “bullet point” demands, and the collection of responses, to the agencies themselves. It is being run by the Office of Personnel Management, which legal experts say does not have authority over the millions of workers targeted.

But typo-ridden emails with the subject line “What did you do last week? Part II” again came to workers at many agencies from the email address hr@opm.gov at the Office of Personnel Management. A plan to transfer the reporting by workers to a Microsoft Forms database had also not been executed.

On Friday, the Office of Personnel Management changed its guidance to federal workers for responding to the emails, which it had previously advised was voluntary. The new guidelines state “consequences for failure to provide the requested information will vary.”

An Environmental Protection Agency employee said she decided to try to calculate how much the email kerfuffle may be costing the government and taxpayers. If 2 million federal employees each spend 15 minutes answering the emails, at an average hourly wage of $35, that will equate to 500,000 hours and $17.5 million going toward responding to the messages each week, she said.

“That’s a conservative estimate,” the employee said. “There are more than 2 million feds, and most of us spent way more than 15 minutes between trying to figure out what it meant, meetings about whether to respond or not and actually writing the email.”

The head of a Veterans Affairs hospital alerted workers on Friday to be prepared for “Round 2” of the “5 things you did last week” directive, which their message called a “tasker.” The hospital leader told employees it was their choice whether to respond to the directive.

A senior career official at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services who retired on Friday, Jeffrey Grant, sent a scathing open letter to the Department of Health and Human Services leader who executed the DOGE-directed firing of 82 of the 600 operations workers Grant managed.

“As a career federal official and senior human capital officer, you had to know that what you were doing was wrong,” Grant wrote to Jeffery Anoka, acting chief human capital officer at the department. “If you were ordered to write those letters, you should have refused to follow that unlawful directive.”

Grant said Anoka’s accusations in the firing letters that the terminated workers are “not fit” for continued employment because they were underperforming and lack required skills and ability are “factually incorrect on all counts.” A department spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Defense Department’s planned firing of 5,400 probationary employees has been temporarily delayed after a federal-court decision blocking such dismissals at the Pentagon and other agencies.

Two Defense officials familiar with the discussion, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said they now expect any firings of Defense Department civilians to be delayed until at least early next week.

A service academy professor, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said a senior human resources official at his institution told employees Friday that they had survived another week and there was no new official guidance about how to proceed.

The academies have argued that firings are not appropriate considering the students involved, the official told employees, but it’s not clear how the Trump administration will view it. The professor said the situation has had a “chilling effect on everything,” with no clarity on whether professors will still be able to earn and keep tenure.

A Defense Intelligence Agency official said employees there were instructed Friday to expect no firings that day, but brace for changes in coming months, including a hiring freeze and voluntary early retirement programs that could thin the workforce. It appears that DIA leaders are attempting to avoid any firings and are “very worried about breaking the agency,” the official said.

The Pentagon has warned that it is looking to eventually cut 5 to 8 percent of its civilian workforce. With more than 900,000 civilian employees across the department, that would equate to tens of thousands of employees.

Four-star generals overseeing combatant commands have requested flexibility to determine how they trim their own staffs to limit damage, another Defense official said. It isn’t clear if the Trump administration will allow it.

Defense Department employees also were thrust into the confusion over how to respond to Musk’s emails. After the initial message was distributed last weekend, Defense officials said employees did not need to respond. That changed with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth saying in a memo Thursday that employees would need to reply to the latest “five bullets” emails.

Musk on Saturday continued to tout what experts say may be wildly inflated projections for how much can be saved through the work led by DOGE, which stands for Department of Government Efficiency. “Reducing fraud & waste of your tax dollars by a trillion dollars in 2026 is possible,” he wrote on X, where he posted a clip of Donald Trump Jr. marveling on Fox News about the $100 billion in “waste” Musk claims to have uncovered so far.

An analysis by The Post found DOGE’s report that it has cut $55 billion so far is exaggerated, built in part on claims of saving billions of dollars from canceling contracts from which there was no money to be saved.

The cost-cutting effort, however, has led to the firing of large numbers of federal employees. Some of the latest to be terminated are at least 85 workers at the Technology Transformation Services division of the General Services Administration, as DOGE tries to remake the federal government’s IT operations into a nerve center for its efficiency initiatives. Early Saturday morning, the entire team received termination notices, according to three people with knowledge of the firings. A copy of the termination email was shared with The Post.

Workers at the Education Department headed into the weekend with a fresh nudge to quit, as the administration on Friday offered them $25,000 to leave. The email warned if they don’t accept, they could still lose their jobs and get no such payout.

They were given until Monday to decide.

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Dan Diamond, John Hudson and Laura Meckler contributed to this report.