OPM Tells Federal Agencies That Employee Response to Its Mass Email Is Voluntary

The U.S. Office of Personnel Management in Washington on Feb. 14, 2025. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

Federal agencies have been notified by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) that their employees can choose to respond or ignore an email asking them to report what they did in the past week to their manager, according to an internal email sent to employees on Monday.

According to the internal email seen by The Epoch Times, employees were told that the OPM has clarified that any response to an email titled, “What did you do last week,” is voluntary and not responding to it “will not be considered a resignation.”

The guidance came after Elon Musk, who is leading the Trump administration’s efforts in cutting government spending, said in a Feb. 23 post on social media platform X that federal workers will be required to respond to an email asking them about the work they completed in the past week and failure to respond would be taken as resignation.

The OPM email directed federal employees to provide a reply with five bullet points listing what they accomplished over the past week and copy their manager in their response email. Recipients were given until 11:59 p.m. local time on Feb. 24 to respond.

The email did not include the dismissal warning Musk had issued in his post on X.

Some departments have issued follow-up directives that contradicted Musk’s comments about the OPM email. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) sent an email to employees on Monday that there is “no HHS expectation that HHS employees respond to OPM and there is no impact to your employment with the agency if you choose not to respond.”

The HHS advised its employees to keep their responses general if they choose to reply to the email and to avoid sharing details about grants or contracts they are working on.

“Assume that what you write will be read by malign foreign actors and tailor your response accordingly,” the email stated.

In a statement on Monday, Musk said the email didn’t ask much and only required recipients to respond.

“The email request was utterly trivial, as the standard for passing the test was to type some words and press send! Yet so many failed even that inane test, urged on in some cases by their managers,” he stated on the social media platform X.

Musk stated in a separate post that federal employees will be given a second chance to respond to the email.

“Subject to the discretion of the President, they will be given another chance. Failure to respond a second time will result in termination,” he stated.

Musk had previously explained that the justification from workers is important because “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.”

“In some cases, we believe non-existent people or the identities of dead people are being used to collect paychecks. In other words, there is outright fraud,” he stated.

Since the start of the Trump administration on Jan. 20, thousands of government employees have been laid off at a multitude of agencies, while others have opted to leave under a buyout from the Trump administration. Those layoffs, in part, occurred as the Department of Government Efficiency led by Musk, is attempting to identify and root out fraud and waste from the federal government.

During a press briefing on Monday, Trump said it was a “pretty genius idea” to send the email to federal workers to see if they attending to their duties.

“We’re trying to find out if people are working and so we’re sending a letter to people: ‘Please tell us what you did last week.’ If people don’t respond, it’s very possible that there is no such person or they’re not working,” the president told reporters.

Federal workers filed a lawsuit against the OPM on Feb. 23, alleging that the agency failed to provide notice regarding any program, rule, policy, or regulation that requires all federal workers to provide a report regarding their recent work to OPM.

House Democrats sent a letter to the leaders of 24 government agencies on Feb. 23, urging them to reject the demand and assure employees that they will not be fired for not responding to the email. The letter was signed by more than 100 Democratic lawmakers.

“You must take immediate action to clarify that the federal employees at your agency are not obligated to respond to this ill-conceived email stunt and that nonresponse cannot constitute resignation,” the letter reads.

The White House, OPM, and HHS did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.

Jack Phillips, Zachary Stieber, and Reuters contributed to this report.