Feb 25 \u2013 US government workers faced widespread confusion on Monday following conflicting advice over compliance with an Elon Musk-backed order to list their last week\u2019s work in an email or face termination.<\/p>\n
Just 48 hours after an email asking \u201cwhat did you do last week?\u201d was sent, the office behind it clarified responses were voluntary, leaving agencies to decide their approach.<\/p>\n
But as this new guidance was shared with federal agencies, President Donald Trump weighed in that workers who did not comply with Mr Musk\u2019s demand would be fired or \u201csort of semi-fired\u201d.<\/p>\n
And later on Monday evening, Mr Musk reinforced the ultimatum, granting workers a final chance to respond.<\/p>\n
The mail from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) on Saturday, instructed recipients to reply with five examples of what they did over the past seven days, without revealing any classified information. The recipients were asked to respond by end of Monday.<\/p>\n
Mr Musk, who is leading the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), said that failure to respond would be taken as a resignation.<\/p>\n
The comments fuelled backlash, with federal worker unions and activist groups filing a lawsuit in California to halt the email mandate.<\/p>\n
Key agencies, including the Departments of Defense, Health and Human Services (HHS), Justice, and the FBI\u2014now led by Trump appointees\u2014instructed employees to ignore the directive. This led to widespread uncertainty, with some workers receiving contradictory messages over the weekend.<\/p>\n
The result was widespread bafflement, as federal workers faced uncertainty over their employment. Many also expressed confusion at the competing guidance they had been given by their respective agencies.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re succeeding in driving us insane,\u201d one employee who works under HHS told the BBC, and asked not to be named for fear of retaliation.<\/p>\n
On Monday afternoon, OPM held a call with the heads of human resources at federal agencies and said it was up to each entity to determine how they want to handle the directive employees received Saturday, according to CBS News, the BBC\u2019s US partner.<\/p>\n
The same afternoon, President Trump told reporters at the White House praising Mr Musk\u2019s demand.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was a lot of genius in sending it,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to find out if people are working and so we\u2019re sending a letter to people, please tell us what you did last week. If people don\u2019t respond, it\u2019s very possible that there is no such person or they\u2019re not working.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd then if you don\u2019t answer like you\u2019re sort of semi-fired or you\u2019re fired because a lot of people are not answering because they don\u2019t even exist,\u201d Trump said.<\/p>\n
Mr Musk maintained he was acting on instructions from President Donald Trump.<\/p>\n
\u201cSubject to the discretion of the President, they will be given another chance,\u201d he wrote on X, apparently referring to workers who did not respond to his demand by the end of Monday. \u201cFailure to respond a second time will result in termination.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe email request was utterly trivial, as the standard for passing the test was to type some words and press send!\u201d he said in another post. \u201cYet so many failed even that inane test, urged on in some cases by their managers. Have you ever witnessed such INCOMPETENCE and CONTEMPT for how YOUR TAXES are being spent?\u201d<\/p>\n
President Trump has tapped Elon Musk to find government waste and inefficiencies. The tech billionaire has earned criticism and praise for focusing much of his attention on US government workers.<\/p>\n
Despite pushback from agencies led by Trump appointees, the White House insisted, \u201cEveryone is working together as one unified team at the direction of President Trump\u201d. \u201cAny notion to the contrary is completely false,\u201d White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said.<\/p>\n
The statement did not explain why different government agencies were giving different recommendations.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Feb 25 \u2013 US government workers faced widespread confusion on Monday following conflicting advice over compliance with an Elon Musk-backed order to list their last week\u2019s work in an email or face termination. Just 48 hours after an email asking \u201cwhat did you do last week?\u201d was sent, the office behind it clarified responses were […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-110958","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110958","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110958"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110958\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110958"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}