A top labor union has condemned Elon Musk’s ultimatum to federal workers as an “unclear and unlawful distraction”, after the Tesla billionaire turned White House-sanctioned cost-cutter demanded federal workers detail what they do at their jobs in bullet points or face dismissal.
The Saturday email sent to millions of employees was the latest salvo in Musk’s campaign, authorized by Donald Trump, to dramatically downsize the federal government. Over the weekend, a coalition of groups opposed to the mass layoffs asked a court to prevent reprisals against employees who fail to reply by the deadline of Monday at midnight.
“This request, and the resulting confusion, is not just inappropriate – it is disruptive to essential government functions,” wrote Everett Kelley, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the largest federal union and one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit originally filed to stop the mass firings of probationary workers.
He warned that the demand pulls “federal employees away from their critical duties without regard for the consequences. As just two examples, a VA surgeon’s attention belongs in the operating room and an air traffic controller’s attention on keeping the skies safe, not on dealing with this unclear and unlawful distraction.”
Musk’s ultimatum was sent out on Saturday in a mass email to federal employees from the office of personnel management (OPM), one of the first federal organs Musk and his team on the so-called “department of government efficiency” infiltrated after Trump was sworn in. The message gave all the US government’s more than 2 million workers barely 48 hours to itemize their accomplishments in the past week in five bullet points, and in a post on X, Musk indicated that “failure to respond will be taken as a resignation”.
The order provoked instant chaos across the government, with Trump’s own appointed leadership in federal agencies responding in starkly different ways. Workers in the Social Security Administration and the health and human services department were told to comply with the email, and CNN reported that the Department of Transportation ordered all its employees to respond to the Musk email by its deadline. That included air traffic controllers who are currently struggling with severe understaffing and a spate of recent accidents.
Several others agencies told their employees to refrain, including the FBI, where the new director, Trump loyalist Kash Patel, asked agents to “please pause any responses”. At the homeland security department, employees were similarly informed that “no reporting action from you is needed at this time”.
All employees at the Department of Defense, who now answer to the former Fox News host and Trump acolyte Pete Hegseth as defense secretary, were ordered to pause responding to the OPM missive. Employees in other federal departments were told to await further orders or to simply ignore Musk’s edict.
“I’m a frontline supervisor and haven’t received any communication as to whether or how to evaluate this,” said a department of education employee, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation. At the US Forest Service, where thousands were dismissed last week, workers told the Guardian the email added new layers of fear and confusion, with no clear instructions on whether they needed to comply.
“I am afraid that if I answer wrong I will get fired,” said a forest service scientist, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Other workers said the weekend email together with its short deadline for reply amplified the atmosphere of siege that has set in since Trump took office.
James Jones, a North Carolina-based maintenance mechanic with the National Park Service and AFGE member, said he was on sick leave Monday to take care of his son, but now had to decide whether to leave him and drive into his office to respond to the email.
“It makes me angry, but I was expecting it,” said Jones, who described the email as “another shenanigan” but said he does not think there will be repercussions for not responding.
Latisha Thompson, a social worker with the department of veterans affairs and AFGE member, said the drumbeat of emails from OPM, including an attempt to coax federal workers to resign en masse, has undercut her productivity.
“This kind of onslaught of intimidation and bullying via email has caused me and my colleagues a lot of distress,” she said.
“I’m not able to concentrate as much as before, or I’m getting little anxieties every time an email comes from some authoritative channel whereas I once did not feel that way.”
Trump has not weighed in on OPM’s latest email, but over the weekend posted on social media a meme that signaled support.
Lawmakers in Congress’ Republican majorities have mostly acquiesced over the past few weeks as Trump has appointed loyalists to key positions and attempted to dismantle entire agencies. But the latest salvo against federal workers prompted a rebuke from Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski, who has a history of squabbles with Trump.
“Our public workforce deserves to be treated with dignity and respect for the unheralded jobs they perform. The absurd weekend email to justify their existence wasn’t it,” she wrote on X.
At least 20,000 federal workers have so far been fired by the Trump administration, most of them recent hires on probationary periods who lack employment protections. In addition, the White House claims that more than 75,000 employees have accepted its offer of deferred resignations.
The purge has prompted speculation that Trump is engaging in one of the biggest job cutting rounds in US history, which could have a powerful knock-on effect on the American economy.
Gabrielle Canon and Michael Sainato contributed reporting.
