Trump Administration Rejects Musk’s Federal Worker Ultimatum

The Trump Administration has put the kibosh on Elon Musk’s decree that federal employees who don’t respond by midnight Monday to a request from the Office of Personnel Management to provide bullet-point summaries outlining their work will be fired.Federal agency brass were told during a call on Monday afternoon with officials from OPM, essentially the HR department for the Government, that they can ignore the previous instructions requiring more than 2 million federal employees to respond to the request, according to a report from the Washington Post.A person who was briefed during the call told the newspaper that OPM said they were looking to enact a weekly reporting system for government departments and that they had already received emails from employees but have “no plans” to review them.The latest development comes after a growing number of federal agencies, even those headed by President Trump’s cabinet picks, pushed back against Elon Musk’s hack-and-slash tactics as head of DOGE, urging their employees not to respond to the recent email that asked them to justify their jobs.Several federal agency heads have told their staff to ignore the letter sent Saturday by the Office of Personnel Management, which asked thousands of federal employees, “Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager.”Brass at numerous federal agencies have instructed employees not to respond to the message, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation — led by Mr. Trump’s pick Kash Patel.The newly minted FBI director told staff to “pause any responses” to the email they received from OPM.“The FBI, through the Office of the Director, is in charge of all our review processes and will conduct further reviews in accordance with the FBI procedures,” Mr. Patel wrote in the message to Bureau staff.On Saturday evening, the State Department’s Acting Under Secretary for Management, Tibor P. Nagy, sent an email to staff urging them not to respond to the OPM email.“You may have received a message from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management requiring you [to] submit five work-related accomplishments. The State Department will respond on behalf of the Department,” read the message from Mr. Nagy. “No employee is obligated to report their activities outside of their department chain of command.”The Pentagon, headed by Pete Hegseth, also a Trump cabinet pick, has urged staffers to “pause” any response.“The Department of Defense is responsible for reviewing the performance of its personnel, and it will conduct any review in accordance with its own procedures,” the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, Jules Hurst, wrote in an email obtained by the Associated Press. “When and if required, the Department will coordinate responses.”Other agencies that have urged employees not to respond to the email include the Department of Energy and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.Mr. Musk took to X over the weekend to say that not responding to the email by a deadline of midnight on Monday would be considered a tendered resignation.“Consistent with President @realDonaldTrump’s instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week,” he wrote. “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”Contrary to Mr. Musk’s claims on social media, the email did not say that any nonresponses would be considered a resignation.His statements mirrored his actions from 2022 when he purchased the social media site that he eventually turned into the X platform. He sent a companywide memo asking staff to commit to an “extremely hardcore” work culture or leave their positions.“Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore,” Mr. Musk wrote at the time in an email with “A fork in the road,” in its subject line. “This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.”“If you are sure that you want to be part of the new Twitter, please click yes on the link below,” he added.

Trump Administration Rejects Musk’s Federal Worker Ultimatum

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