Musk to Federal Workers: 'What Did You Do Last Week?'

Elon Musk has given federal workers another deadline—this time, they have to justify their jobs in an email or risk losing them.

• First threat: Musk tweeted Saturday afternoon that employees would soon receive an email "requesting to understand what they got done last week." He added: "Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation."
• The emails: They began arriving hours later, reports the Washington Post. "Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager," reads the note, sent out under the subject line, "What did you do last week?" It said workers had to respond by 11:59pm Eastern Monday. Unlike the earlier tweet, it did not say employees would lose their jobs if they failed to comply.

• Chaos, pushback: The email set off chaos within federal agencies, some of which told their employees to hold off responding until they received guidance, reports the New York Times. The FBI, under new leader Kash Patel, was among the agencies telling employees not to respond just yet. Employees across the government received the message, including those at the State Department, the EPA, the Office of Personnel Management, the FDA, the Veterans Affairs Department, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
• Trump: The original Musk tweet came soon after President Trump praised Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency but asked Musk to be even more "aggressive," notes Reuters. Later Saturday, Trump boasted of the mass firings to shrink the government and send bureaucrats "packing," per the AP. "Nobody's ever seen anything like this," he said in a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference.
• Challenge, and a defense: Everett Kelly of the National President of the American Federation of Government Employees called the Musk email "cruel and disrespectful" and promised a legal challenge, per USA Today. Musk himself, however, later called his email easy to answer. "An email with some bullet points that make any sense at all is acceptable!" he wrote. "Should take less than 5 mins to write."

(More Elon Musk stories.)