If you do not respond to an email within 48 hours, you will be fired. A new measure by Elon Musk after assuming his new position
Billionaire Elon Musk has launched a new initiative in his role as head of the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The business mogul sent an email to state officials asking them to summarize their work activity over the past week before Monday. The X founder also made it clear in a tweet that failure to respond would be considered a “resignation” from his job.
The strategy comes after US President Donald Trump publicly asked Musk to be “more aggressive” in his actions with DOGE. “At President Trump’s direction, all federal employees will soon receive an email requesting an explanation for what they did last week. Failure to respond will be considered resignation,” Musk said.
The email had the subject line "What did you do last week?" and asked employees to summarize their work over the past few days in "five bullet points" by midnight Monday at the latest, which US media outlets were able to verify.
The email was received by employees from various government offices, including the FBI, the Department of State, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Office of Personnel Management, the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
“Elon Musk is doing a great job, but I wish he was more aggressive,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Saturday afternoon. “Remember, we have a country to save.”
In response to Musk’s threat, the heads of several federal agencies as well as unions instructed their workers not to respond to the email. Newly appointed FBI Director Kash Patel told his employees to ignore Musk’s demands, as did leaders at the State Department and the National Security Agency, according to reports in various US media outlets.
After winning the election last November, Trump announced the creation of DOGE to cut bureaucracy and appointed Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy as its leaders, but the latter later withdrew from the organization. Last week, Musk was at the White House with Trump, where he explained to the press what DOGE is doing and insisted, in the face of opposition criticism, that his administration is “transparent.”