Government workers in the United States received an email on Saturday afternoon asking them to list their achievements from the past week or resign – the worst development in the efforts of the Trump administration aimed at the federal workforce.
The email came after the billionaire Trump trustee Elon Musk has tweed out that employees “will soon receive an email asking them to find out what they did last week.”
“The failure to answer will be considered as a resignation,” he writes.
Musk leads external efforts to aggressively restrict government spending through financing and dismissal redundancies.
The email arrived in the incoming boxes shortly after Trump spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). The messages came with the topic “What did you do last week?” by sender referred to as HR.
The Federal Government's Human Resources Agency has confirmed that the email is authentic in a statement to CBS, the US partner of the BBC.
“As part of the Trump administration's commitment to an effective and responsible federal workforce, OPM asks employees to provide a brief summary of what they did last week until the end of Monday, CC'ing their manager. Agencies will determine all the next steps. “
In a copy of the Email received by the BBC, employees were asked to explain their achievements from last week at five points from the bullet – without revealing classified information – before midnight on Monday.
The message did not mention whether the failure to answer would be considered resignation.
The US Federation of Government Officers, the largest union representing federal officials, criticized the message as “cruel and disrespectful” and promised to dispute any “illegal termination” of federal officials.
“Once again, Elon Musk and the Trump Administration have shown their neglect to the federal officials and the critical services they provide to the American people,” said Everett Kelly, president of the Union in a statement.
Recently confirmed FBI Director Kash Patel told his employees in an email that they should “pause all the answers” on the OPM note.
“The FBI staff may have received an email from OPM that wants information,” Patel wrote in a message received from CBS News. “The FBI, through the Director's service, is responsible for all our review processes and will carry out examinations in accordance with the FBI procedures.”
Earlier during the day, Trump advertised abbreviations and told a crowd of supporters on CPAC that the work of federal officials was insufficient because some of them have been working remote for at least some time.
“We are removing all unnecessary, incompetent and corrupt bureaucrats from the federal workforce,” the president told the crowd of the annual conference in suburban Washington on Saturday afternoon.
“We want to make the government less, more effective,” he added. “We want to keep the best people and we will not keep the oldest people.”
The Elon Musk team has imposed widespread changes in the US federal infrastructure, with the White House approval, through the so -called Ministry of Government Efficiency (Doge).
Thousands of civil servants in the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the Pentagon and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), as well as other agencies, have been fired in recent weeks.
Email reflects the processing of Musk of employees after he acquired the social media platform Twitter in 2022. While the staff there he was shrunk under his ownership, he issued ultimatums that now include the known request to be “extremely firm” at work Or resign.
Trump has repeatedly applauded measures to reduce the Musk government.
In a social post of truth, Trump said that Musk is doing a “great job” to reduce the size of the federal government and that he would like to see him “to become more aggressive” in the pursuit.