Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has been dramatically cutting federal jobs over the past month, creating chaos and fear throughout the federal workforce, but meeting little official pushback. This weekend, however, the heads of other federal agencies seemed to take a stand against further worker cuts by instructing employees not to engage with Musk’s latest email demand.
On Saturday, approximately 2.3 million government workers received an email from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which acts as the HR department for the federal workforce, with the subject line “What did you do last week?” The letter instructed employees to list five examples of what they had accomplished within that time frame, excluding classified information, by midnight on Monday. Musk posted on X that “failure to respond will be taken as resignation,” although the email itself made no such claim.
While previous moves from Musk and DOGE have been met with silence from top agency leadership, this case was different. The Department of Defense posted a statement on X Sunday defying the DOGE directive, stating that “when and if required, the Department will coordinate responses to the email you have received from OPM.” Employees at the State Department were told that the department would be replying to the OPM email on their behalf, and that “no employee is encouraged to report their activities outside of their department chain of command.”
