New details have emerged about the recent email that went out to federal employees over the weekend that sparked so much controversy and confusion.
President Trump held a Cabinet meeting at the White House on Wednesday, February 26. Elon Musk was in attendance and both Musk and Trump talked about the situation with the email that went out to all Executive Branch federal employees from the Office of Personnel Management with the question, “What did you do last week?”
Trump wrote in a posting on Truth Social that he wanted Musk to “get more aggressive,” and Musk said in remarks he made in the Cabinet meeting yesterday that in response, he asked if his team could send the email out to federal employees and the President said he could.
Musk explained the confusion around the email and its intended purpose in his remarks at the meeting.
“I think that email, perhaps, was misinterpreted as a performance review, but actually it was a pulse check review. ‘Do you have a pulse? Do you have a pulse and two neurons?’ So, if you have a pulse and two neurons, you can reply to an email,” said Musk.
He said it’s a task anyone should be able to accomplish and added:
But what we are trying to get to the bottom of is we think there are a number of people on the government payroll who are dead, which is probably why they can’t respond, and — and some people who are not real people, like they’re literally fictional individuals… So, we’re just literally trying to figure out are these people real, are they alive, and can they write an email, which I think is a reasonable expectation for…the American public would have at least that expectation of someone in the public sector.
Musk also said that another email was going to be sent for the same purpose. No timeframe was given on when that would happen.
Update: the AP reported that the new email started going out late Friday. The report says that the email was coming from individual agencies instead of OPM. It asked for 5 bullets listing accomplishments from the past week and said that federal employees would be expected to submit a response each week going forward by Monday at 11:59 PM ET.
“Our goal is not to be capricious or unfair,” said Musk. “We want to give people every opportunity to send an email and the email could simply be ‘What I’m working on is too sensitive or classified to — to describe.’ Like, literally, just [reply] that would be sufficient. I think this is just common sense.”
Musk also said, “We wish to keep everyone who is doing a job that is essential and doing that job well. But if the job is not essential or they’re not doing the job well, they obviously should not be on the public payroll.”
As to what would happen to federal employees who had not responded to the email or what would happen with the second email, Trump said that anyone who doesn’t respond could be subject to termination.
He said:
I think it’s a good idea [sending a second email] because, you know, those people, as I said before, they’re on the bubble. You got a lot of people that have not responded, so we’re trying to figure out, do they exist? Who are they? And it’s possible that a lot of those people will be actually fired. And if that happened, that’s okay, because that’s what we’re trying to do. This country has gotten bloated and fat and disgusting and incompetently run.
In separate remarks he made from the Oval Office on February 25, Trump went into more detail about the email situation. He said responding to the email is “somewhat voluntary,” but added, “I guess if you don’t answer you get fired.”
He confirmed what Musk said about it primarily serving as a confirmation of which employees are present and working. Furthermore, he said if federal employees respond, it confirms they are there working and have no further obligation, but regarding not responding, he said it could mean people are no longer working in their positions:
If they’re not [working], it could be there’s no such person, it could be that the person is no longer working, they’re no longer living at that address, they maybe moved, maybe they moved to a different country, or maybe the person doesn’t exist. And we then take that person off the payroll and we save a lot of money by doing that. I think it’s a very smart thing. And it says if you don’t answer, essentially, you know, there’s a penalty to pay, like that’s the end of the job.
The reporter also asked if Musk was speaking for Trump in issuing the directives on the email sent to federal employees. The President responded by saying he takes responsibility and added, “The buck stops here.”
Trump added:
We have to find out if people are getting paid and they’re not working. Let’s say they have another job and they write in false statements. They may be working for somebody else but getting paid by the US government, and that would mean that they are not allowed to be doing that. They are not allowed to be working for us and be working for somebody else. We’re paying them a lot of money.
His complete remarks are in this video, also embedded above.
A lawsuit was filed by a group of federal employee unions over the first email which argued that it “has not complied with any procedural requirements” under the Administrative Procedure Act.
Just before the Monday night deadline for responding to the first email, the Office of Personnel Management issued guidance for agencies. Among other things, it said that federal employees who were on approved leave on February 24, or who lacked access to email, were not expected to respond by the deadline and also added that agency heads had discretion to exclude their employees from responding.
Part of the guidance said, “…agencies should consider any appropriate actions regarding employees who fail to respond to activity/accomplishment requests. It is agency leadership’s decision as to what actions are taken.”
