What to know about Elon Musk’s ‘What did you do last week?’ email

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The new director of the FBI said over the weekend to staff that they should ‘pause any responses’ to the email. Federal workers faced conflicting guidance from President Trump, their agencies and union leaders in responding to a request to detail their professional accomplishments over the past week.

Here is what we know about the query. An email on Saturday asked staff to respond with a list of “5 bullets of what you accomplished last week" with a deadline of 11:59 p.m. Monday.

The email asked employees not to send any classified information. The request, which asked “What did you do last week?" in the subject line, came directly from the Office of Personnel Management, bypassing agency leaders. Musk, who unveiled the plan Saturday on his social-media platform, wrote on X that “failure to respond will be taken as a resignation." That guidance wasn’t included in OPM’s email, and OPM later told senior officials that responding to the email was voluntary.

Agency leaders split on how to handle the query. Some entities, including the Education and Treasury departments, urged employees to comply. The Commerce Department did so too but specified that the five bullet points go to first-line supervisors instead of OPM.

Others issued qualifications or rebuffed the request. The Energy Department told employees it would provide “a coordinated response" to the OPM email, and urged individual employees not to respond. Health and Human Services told employees to “assume that what you write will be read by malign foreign actors." Kash Patel, Trump’s new director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said over the weekend to staff that they should “pause any responses" to the email sent by OPM,