The request was at best a bad joke, and I think you know that too.

If the real purpose, as Musk later stated, was to see who would respond and who would not, with no consideration of content, why deceive? Be direct: "This is a test of government employee email deliverability and responsiveness. Please reply to this email when you receive it. An empty reply is fine, you do not need to put anything in the email."

If you want to know what people are working on, you work with the management chains because those are the people whose job it is to know what their people are working on. You take your time to dig into the data, talk to people at all levels, understand the structure and the work. This request, in the way and fashion it was made, shows an incredible lack of disrespect, distrust, and disregard for federal employees across the board. If I were a government employee and received that mail, I would be unable to avoid expressing my own disrespect and distrust in my reply.

These emails sets up a self-fulfilling prophecy where government fails to serve the people. Some people leave public service. Others stay but are disillusioned and checked out because they know their actual job performance no longer matters, the whims of a billionaire who voted with his wallet to make himself co-president can destroy their livelihood at any moment. Over time, you have people who are unable to leave and thus will do what they're told out of fear, and unqualified loyalists who just do what they're told.

I think it’s a brilliant and effective way to route out insubordination and dead workers.

I hope you never end up in a position of management, because it's a real shitty way to manage people.

On every team I’ve worked on there is an expectation of at least weekly updates. Usually a daily or every other daily standup. The request is not unreasonable.

I can never know what I’d do when faced with a position where I believed some of my budget was going to pay dead and inactive employees, and where members of the management chain were insubordinate and unwilling to help identify the issue and even complicit. I’d guess I’d just fire them all. Is that more humane?

> On every team I’ve worked on there is an expectation of at least weekly updates. Usually a daily or every other daily standup. The request is not unreasonable.

At the team level, that is of course quite reasonable.

Doing this from a top-down approach in an organization at any real scale is fucking insane.

If a random person joined your company’s Slack and said “tell me what you do, or I will fire you,” and your CEO then said to ignore it, which one would you go with?

If the board of my company (my CEO’s boss) showed up in Slack and asked, I would probably listen to my CEO’s boss. And what a poor CEO for risking his entire workforce and his own position on a political squabble.

I think it's a great moment for the CEO to have a spine and show the stupidity of the board in that moment.

"To the board: if you have this level of distrust for my management, you should fire me immediately. This request is out of line, and shows great disrespect for our employees as well as myself. If you are dissatisfied with the information you receive about the company's operations and performance, you can talk to me and my staff about that. I will not allow you to display such callous disregard for the people under my leadership."

I’m sure this great CEO will continue to be a great leader under other management, then. We’ll see if Cuban actually follows through on his offer or if it’s just political virtue signaling.

> If the board of my company (my CEO’s boss) showed up in Slack and asked ...

You would write "Ask HN: my company has thousands of employees, a board member showed up in Slack and told everyone to write him a weekly summary, or we'll be fired, what to do?" and everybody would be like "WTF that's beyond stupid, name the company, also it's time to polish your resume!" yada yada.

Don't be obtuse.

What if the CEO was just put in place by the chairman of the board. As was the case for many of the agencies that told their employees not to respond.

And it’s not the board that send the emails, it’s a committee created by the board.

It’s unclear whether OPM has the authority to order employees to do anything.

The real way to do this. If it was what they actually wanted to happen was for the president to issue an executive order requiring everyone to logon to a secure site and fill out a form. Then give some kind of reasonable deadline that makes allowances for people on PTO or leave.

That’s not how well-functioning organizations operate. Power is delegated, and if it’s publicly undercut, there is a loss of trust in leadership.

If a board wants something done, they can urge the CEO to implement it, but they do not hold unilateral power to dictate internal operations. They can vote to remove the CEO if they feel that they aren’t producing the desired result, but again, this is an indirect action.

> If the board of my company (my CEO’s boss) showed up in Slack and asked, I would probably listen to my CEO’s boss.

DOGE are not the boss of most (any?) government departments. Its entire purpose, legally, is to improve software: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/esta...

So once again, who are they to ask this, legally? Who are they to fire employees from other departments who rightfully deny this request?

> This appears to be a targeted cut of insubordinate or redundant individuals.

What a wild take!

Only some of sooo many reports all over the media 5-6 days ago that you somehow missed:

"Key US agencies tell staff not to answer Musk email on what they did last week"

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj0qrj20g5vo

"Elon Musk’s Federal Worker Emails: Agency Leaders Can Decide If Employees Must Reply, White House Says"

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2025/02/25/elon-mu...

And the latest from today:

"Some government employees are instructed — again — to not respond to 5 things email as Musk doubles down"

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/01/5-things-email-nati...

Sounds like insubordination.

Most of the agency heads telling employees not to respond were just installed by the President within the last few weeks.

They answer directly to the President. The email was sent by someone at OPM who also answers directly to the President.

The President has issued no formal orders regarding these emails. He did issue an executive order telling employees to comply with DOGE requests but this email came from OPM not DOGE.

There whole thing is an unclear clusterfuck.

A previous memo from the exact same email address as the "5 bullets" email told employees that this email account was being established as a way to communicate with every single federal employee at once, and stated clearly that no one was obligated to reply to any messages from the email account. They can't even figure out what the hell they are doing and be consistent with their own messages.

Once again, you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.

A judge has ruled otherwise.

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/27/opm-firing-probatio...

> A judge ruled Thursday that the Office of Personnel Management — the central human resources office for the federal government — broke the law when it ordered other federal agencies to terminate thousands of “probationary” employees.

> “OPM does not have any authority whatsoever under any statute in the history of the universe to hire and fire employees within another agency,” the judge said.

"the people let go were unable or unwilling to send an email listing 5 things they accomplished in the last week"

This is entirely false. This is so incredibly false that I am actually shocked you were willing to post it. It is hard for me to imagine anything more absurd and untrue someone could have said about this topic. I tremble with fear thinking about what your media diet must look like in order for you to believe this absolute nonsense.

It’s from TFA.

TFA: “After thousands of government layoffs, the Office of Personnel Management on Saturday directed federal workers to email a list of roughly five accomplishments”

This email came AFTER thousands of layoffs!

You have implied every laid-off employee was given a chance to reply to the email and didn’t, which is contrary to TFA.

I don’t think you’re interpreting the article’s wording correctly.

Well, why don’t you write your interpretation, and explain how that quote from TFA means that the email came before any layoffs.

18F was let go yesterday morning, 1 March.

2nd “what did you do” email came Friday, 28, Feb.

1st “what did you do” email came Saturday 22 Feb.

I was incorrect, and you are right about the order of events in this case, although I don't believe TFA says these 18F employees didn't reply to the email. I noted in an edit that I accidentally pulled a quote from a different article. I believe the gist of what I and others are saying here is still true.

Some other points:

* The second email came "late Friday" and the layoffs happened hours later at 1 am on Saturday, so it's not reasonable to count the second email as a warning or genuine attempt to find the "good" employees. I'm guessing it was just blasted out and happened to land in their inboxes before the firing notice did.

* Based on https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/01/general-services-ad... it appears the entire 18F unit was cut, so this doesn't seem targeted or predicated on email responses. Also, I'm not a leader, but if 100% of my organization didn't comply with an order, cutting them all is probably a much less effective decision than trying to meet them half-way. I guess if they've truly been doing nothing for years, there would be no loss, but that seems unlikely to be true in most cases including 18F's.

* Your initial comment appeared to be speaking generally on DOGE cuts, so it is fair for us to be responding accordingly. 18F seems to have been pretty small, but part of the reason this story is interesting is everything else DOGE is doing. As we've said, plenty of cuts happened before and independent of any email. Personally I'm doubtful that responding does much, but I'd be interested in any reporting on employee's experiences or what DOGE is saying about responses and how it affects their decisions.

Like I said above, I don't think TFA mentioned 18F's responses and there's not really a good reason to assume that the layoffs were due to no response.

It absolutely is not. The article says no such thing and you show yourself as an untrustworthy participant in this discussion.

> Those impacted in the wee hours of Saturday morning also received emails late Friday from DOGE with the subject line, “What did you do last week? Part II.”

They were asked first last last week. And then again on Friday.

——

> According to Politico, the emails — prompting employees to list their weekly accomplishments by Monday — were widely distributed across multiple agencies, including the State Department, the IRS, and the NIH.

I’m not making this shit up…

These quotes support the existence of the emails, which people here aren't disputing. They say nothing about whether the only layoffs were those who didn't respond, which was implied by your original statement that "the people let go were unable or unwilling to send an email listing 5 things they accomplished in the last week."

The emails went to every federal employee, not any specific agencies. You don't seem to know anything about this whatsoever

My wife got the email, did not reply, and is not fired. You have no idea what you're talking about

I don't care where it's from, it is still false. The layoffs were happening long before this email went out, and the vast majority of them had nothing to do with the email. The threat to fire people over the email was toothless and illegal, and as far as we know from public evidence no one has been fired over it. You have no idea what you're talking about

Elon Musk is not the boss or the king to order employees to submit to his will.

And yet you act like he is.

Who is he to order DoD or DoJ employees to write this email?

DOGE is not equal to Elon

Who are DOGE to order DoD and DoJ employees to write this letter?

Neither DOGE nor Elon wrote this email. OPM did. Since OPM is now ran by a former Elon employee, they probably sent it at Elon’s request. Maybe the President was informed beforehand maybe not.

It doesn’t matter either way. The President has the authority to order employees to perform certain tasks but he has to do it through proper channels.

OPM doesn’t have the authority to order non-OPM employees to perform specific duties. They never have in the past. And the President has issued no executive orders stating that OPM has this authority now.

Where are you getting the idea that the email is related at all? For government offices were I know workers, firing is based on 100% seniority, completely independent of performance or email responses.

> For government offices were I know workers, firing is based on 100% seniority, completely independent of performance or email responses.

Reductions in force due to mission/budget/etc. changes, etc., which are based on seniority, not firings, which are (where civil service protections apply) exclusively for documented misconduct or incompetence and have due process protections.

It’s true that private industry (at least outside of unionized workplaces) leverage at-will employment to blur the line between mission/budget-based staffing reductions and for-cause firings, but the civil service isn’t at will and the line is a sharp legal distinction.

I was speaking to current rank and file layoffs. Are you agreeing they fall under seniority dismissal?

To be legal, without individual cause, they would have to, but they don't appear to have followed the law for either seniority-based reductions or for-cause firings (and in at least some cases there appear to have been directives given to falsely characterize broad policy-focus based dismissals as for-cause firings.)