Musk gives US federal employees 48 hours to explain what they did last week

Hundreds of thousands of federal workers in the US are being given little more than 48 hours to explain what they accomplished over the last week, sparking confusion across key agencies as billionaire Elon Musk expands his crusade to slash the size of federal government.

“Consistent with President @realDonaldTrump’s instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week,” Musk posts on X, which he owns. “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”

Shortly afterward, federal employees receive a three-line email with this instruction: “Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager.”

The deadline to reply is Monday at 11:59 p.m., although the email does not include Musk’s social media threat about those who fail to respond.

The latest unusual directive from Musk’s team injects a new sense of chaos across beleaguered multiple agencies, including the National Weather Service and the State Department, as senior officials work to verify the message’s authenticity Saturday night and in some cases, instruct their employees not to respond.

McLaurine Pinover, a spokesperson at the Office of Personnel Management, confirms Musk’s directive and says that individual agencies will “determine any next steps.”

The National Weather Service leadership acknowledges some confusion in a message to employees.

“Within the last few hours, some of us — potentially all of us — received an email message titled ‘What did you do last week?’ Until such time as we can verify that the message that was received at or around 4:46pm ET is authentic, please do not respond,” it reads.