Elon Musk’s Doge sends ‘cruel and disrespectful’ email to all US federal employees asking just one question

Elon Musk, who insists applying the same approach he took around staffing at Twitter/X to US federal employees with Doge “works” (despite The Washington Post reporting in September that investors in Musk’s social media platform have “lost billions in value”), has given government officials a “cruel” ultimatum over the weekend: provide a list of five things they did this week or lose their job.

The Tesla boss and SpaceX founder was told by US president Donald Trump in a Truth Social post on Saturday to “get more aggressive” in his work at the Department of Government Efficiency, and it seems Musk decided to act upon that by potentially triggering mass resignations if they don’t do one task asked of them.

In a post to Twitter/X on Saturday, Musk explained: “Consistent with President @realDonaldTrump’s instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week.

“Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”

Several screenshots later circulated on social media appearing to show an email from a HR inbox, sent on Saturday, with the subject line asking the federal employees: “What did you do last week?”

In the body of the email, staff are told to reply with “approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week”, and copy their manager into their message, by 11:59pm EST on Monday (4:59am Tuesday, UK time).

They shouldn’t send over “any classified information, links or attachments”, though.

Musk has since claimed “the bar is very low” when it comes to providing a satisfactory response, stating such an email “should take less than 5 mins to write” and a message “with some bullet points that make any sense at all is acceptable”.

He also went on to share that “a large number of good responses” have already been sent back, from employees Musk said “are the people who should be considered for promotion”.

The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), a trade union which represents federal government employees, branded the move “cruel and disrespectful”, and said it would “challenge any unlawful terminations”:

Another Twitter/X account pointed out that with there being millions of federal government employees, having one email inbox deal with all of those replies could be tricky:

Meanwhile MSNBC journalist Sam Stein noted the emails sent out don’t say anything about a lack of a response being “taken as a resignation”, with the only note about that coming from Musk’s Twitter account:

And at the end of a wild week, one account wondered how Musk would answer his own question:

However, a number of agencies are already telling employees not to provide a response to Musk’s email, including the FBI and its new director Kash Patel:

And the US Department of State:

So much for a restful weekend, huh?

Why not read…

• Trump accused of ‘extortion’ amid reports Musk’s Starlink could be pulled over Ukraine minerals deal
• So, why was Elon Musk wielding a chainsaw on stage? Billionaire's bizarre CPAC move explained

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