Federal workers started to receive emails late Friday evening asking them to provide a list of accomplishments from the week, a reprise of a request by Elon Musk that spread fear and confusion through the government just days ago.
The email, titled “What did you do last week? Part II,” echoed an email sent to federal workers last weekend that instructed them to reply with a list of around five accomplishments from their workweek. That blast came shortly after Mr. Musk, the billionaire President Trump has assigned to shrink the federal work force, said on social media that failure to respond to the coming message would be “taken as a resignation.”
The email on Friday from the Office of Personnel Management, the government’s human resources arm, went to workers at various agencies, including the F.B.I., the General Services Administration, and the Defense, Justice, Labor and Agriculture Departments, according to copies of emails seen by The New York Times.
Like the earlier email, it directed them to send approximately five bullets describing what they achieved this week. But it also said that, going forward, employees would be expected to complete the task weekly by Monday at 11:59 p.m. Eastern time.
There were other slight differences from the first email. This time, employees who worked only on classified or sensitive activities were instructed to write “all of my activities are sensitive” in response.
It is unclear what consequences, if any, there will be if employees fail to comply with the new directive.
Although Mr. Musk said he was acting at the encouragement of Mr. Trump, the original email and threat of possible dismissal sowed chaos across the federal government, and little clarity has emerged since.
In some cases, federal employees do not have access to their government email when they are not working. Some supervisors instructed employees to respond, while others told them not to. Privately, some agency leaders worried that complying with Mr. Musk’s orders could result in employees revealing national security secrets and other sensitive information. By Monday afternoon, the Office of Personnel Management informed agencies that they did not have to require employees to respond to the original email requesting details of their workweek.
Adding to the confusion at the end of the week, some employees were told to expect the next email to come at a later date. On Friday afternoon, civilian employees at the Defense Department were informed that the email would arrive Monday, and that a response was expected. By Friday night, workers at the department had already received an email from the Office of Personnel Management. Agencies had been expected to send the directive to their employees directly this time.
Earlier this week, Mr. Musk explained why he wanted federal employees to fulfill his demand to detail their work.
“What we are trying to get to the bottom of is, we think there are a number of people on the government payroll who are dead, which is probably why they can’t respond,” Mr. Musk said during a cabinet meeting on Wednesday. “So, we’re just literally trying to figure out are these people real, are they alive, and can they write an email, which I think is a reasonable expectation.”
Recent legal challenges have tested the limits of the power that the Office of Personnel Management wields over the federal civilian work force, which is made up of roughly 2.3 million people. On Thursday night, a federal judge ruled that the agency had exceeded its authority when it issued memos outlining steps to fire most federal workers on probation.
“Congress has given the authority to hire and fire to the agencies themselves,” Judge William Alsup of the Northern District of California said. “The Office of Personnel Management does not have any authority whatsoever, under any statute — in the history of the universe — to hire and fire employees within another agency.”
Reporting was contributed by Greg Jaffe, Adam Goldman, Nicholas Nehamas, Ryan Mac, Kate Conger and Zach Montague.
