Elon Musk, a tech billionaire, said Sunday that the email to federal employees asking them to report back on their weekly accomplishments is intended to detect “outright fraud” from people on the payroll who are not working at all.
“The reason this matters is that a significant number of people who are supposed to be working for the government are doing so little work that they are not checking their email at all!” Musk responded on his social media platform X to a post about the email.
“In some cases, we believe non-existent people or the identities of dead people are being used to collect paychecks,” Mr. Musk said. “In other words, there is outright fraud.”
Musk, who has led the White House’s effort to expose waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government, announced Saturday afternoon on X that federal employees would soon receive an email “requesting to understand what they got done last week.”
“Failure to response will be taken as a resignation,” the official stated.
The Hill reviewed the message, which instructed federal employees to “please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullet points of what you accomplished last week.”
The email directed employees to include their manager in their responses, not to send any classified information or attachments, and to respond by 11:59 p.m. EST Monday.
As with many of Musk’s actions and directives, the backlash was swift.
Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), issued a critical statement Saturday.
“It is cruel and disrespectful to hundreds of thousands of veterans who are wearing their second uniform in the civil service to be forced to justify their job duties to this out-of-touch, privileged, unelected billionaire,” according to Kelley.
“AFGE will challenge any unlawful terminations of our members and federal employees across the country.”
Musk stated early Sunday that he had already received “a large number of good responses” to the email and that “these are the people who should be considered for promotion.”
The new Trump administration strategy comes as Musk plays a significant role in helping Trump reduce the federal workforce. Musk wielded a chainsaw at the Conservative Political Action Conference earlier this week, praising the cuts and declaring, “This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy.”
