In a renewed attempt by President Trump and Elon Musk to demand answers from the federal workforce, some federal workers received another email requiring them to explain their duties.
In a renewed attempt by President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk to demand answers from the government workforce, some federal workers received another email on Friday night requiring them to explain their recent accomplishments.
That email, obtained by News4, contains the subject line "What did you do last week? Part II".
Like the first email, the follow-up asks for five bullet points describing accomplishments for the week.
Workers are expected to send a response every week by Monday at midnight, the follow-up email said.
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To add another layer of confusion to the second email, just after 7:30 a.m. on Saturday, the State Department told its employees to hold off on responding. Instead, the department will be handling those responses, according to acting undersecretary of state for management Tibor Nagy.
The first of these Musk-directed emails came in the afternoon on Saturday, Feb. 22, and said: “Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager. Please do not send any classified information, links, or attachments. Deadline is this Monday at 11:59pm EST.”
Though the email did not tie federal workers' actions in response to the email to any particular consequence, it came after Musk wrote in a post on X that “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.”
The email ultimatum indicated confusion among administration officials, in addition to the bewilderment it caused federal workers.
In a sign that not every Trump official was on the same page with Musk’s productivity inquiry, FBI Director Kash Patel instructed employees to “pause any responses” to the email asking federal employees what they accomplished in that first week. Patel said the FBI will review the work of its own employees in accordance with its own procedures.
The Department of Health and Human Services also sent agency employees an email Monday afternoon warning them that any responses to Elon Musk’s request that they share their accomplishments from the past week might “be read by malign foreign actors.”
The Office of Personnel Management ultimately told agency leaders shortly before the Monday deadline for responses to that first email that the request was optional, although it left the door open for similar demands going forward.
Musk later stated during a cabinet meeting that the email was not a "performance review" but instead a "pulse check review" to see how many federal employees had "a pulse and two neurons."
Three sources with knowledge of the system told NBC News that email responses will be fed into an LLM (Large Language Model), an advanced AI system that looks at huge amounts of text data to understand, generate and process human language. The AI system will determine whether someone’s work is mission-critical or not.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
