On August 5, 2025, Scott Kupor, Director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), formally announced the end of the controversial weekly “five things” email initiative. He said:
We communicated with agency HR leads that OPM was no longer going to manage the five things process nor utilize it internally. At OPM, we believe that managers are accountable to staying informed about what their team members are working on and have many other existing tools to do so.
Reuters originally reported Kupor’s announcement.
History Behind the “Five Things” Email Initiative
The “five things” email was initially announced in February by Elon Musk when he was leading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
On February 22, 2025, Musk posted on X, “Consistent with President @realDonaldTrump’s instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week. Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”
The email that was later sent from OPM read:
Subject: What did you do last week?
Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last
week and cc your manager.Please do not send any classified information, links, or attachments.
Deadline is this Monday at 11:59 p.m. EST
On February 23, 2025, Musk wrote another post on X which elaborated further the reasoning behind the directive for federal employees to send the email listing their weekly accomplishments. He wrote:
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!
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.
OPM issued formal guidance explaining the email that was sent to all Executive Branch federal employees. It said:
Responses to this email should be directed to agency leadership, with a copy to OPM at [email protected]. Agencies should review responses and evaluate non-responses, considering such factors as whether the employee was on excused leave on Monday, February 24, 2025 or had access to email on that date. Employees on approved leave on February 24, or who lacked access to email, are not expected to respond by the deadline. Agency heads may exclude personnel from this expectation at their discretion and should inform OPM of the categories of the employees excluded and reasons for exclusion.
Agencies should consider whether the expectation for employees to submit activity and/or accomplishment bullets should be integrated into the agency’s Weekly Activity Report or future required organizational activity reporting in order provide an enterprise-wide view of workforce achievements and organizational trends. Furthermore, 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.
The initiative became a weekly requirement for federal employees. However, since OPM left it up to individual agency discretion, there were mixed results on compliance. The FBI, for instance, told its employees to ignore the emails.
As time went on, compliance further waned. In May, for instance, the Department of Defense formally ended the weekly email requirement for its civilian employees.
Last week, Kupor seemed to indicate that the initiative would soon be eliminated. He told FedScoop in an interview:
I don’t think it’s [“five things” weekly email] been a very active effort, to be completely honest, in the last like month or two. As with all things, I think we should take a look at that and see is it accomplishing, quite frankly, what it was intended to accomplish? And if so, we should keep doing it. But I don’t want to keep doing things just for the sake of the fact that they existed at one point in time. So it’s something that we’re looking at to see: Does it actually add any value and do agencies want to keep doing it? If not, then my goal would be to figure out how do we sunset things that may not have lasting value?
“Building a High-Performance Culture” at OPM
Kupor has begun writing weekly blog posts sharing information about what is taking place at OPM. He also wrote a letter to OPM employees on August 1, 2025, shortly after becoming OPM’s new director.
Rather than rely on the weekly emails, Kupor has emphasized a shift toward agency-based performance management and regular check-ins between supervisors and their employees. In the letter, he wrote:
I’m sharing some important changes we’re making around performance management at OPM. These changes are grounded in a simple belief: our people are our most important asset, and everyone deserves to work in an environment where great work is recognized and where underperformance is addressed fairly and consistently.
We have provided a lot more implementation details to our managers, but at a high level they include:
- Rewarding top performers with meaningful, differentiated bonuses/other recognition so work that goes above and beyond and meaningfully furthers the overall goals of the organization doesn’t go unnoticed or get diluted by less differentiated rewards;
- Reintroducing prestigious programs like the Director’s Awards and Presidential Rank Awards in FY’26;
- Empowering supervisors to coach, support, and take timely action when performance is not meeting expectations;
- Focusing on regular, transparent check-ins that keep you aligned with team goals and give you the opportunity to course-correct early. Clear and consistent guidance is a matter of fundamental fairness to employees; we should not surprise team members with negative (or positive) news; and
- Encouraging innovation and experimentation, including through new awards for employees who help the agency reduce waste, fraud, or abuse, or otherwise identify and implement ways to meaningfully improve the operational efficiency of our organization.
Regarding the “five things” emails specifically, he wrote:
Our view is simple: every federal manager has an obligation to track and prioritize what their team is working on – be that through regular one-on-ones or otherwise. The five things email was an augment to that, so if managers find it useful to deploy, they of course are free to do so directly. But OPM will no longer maintain a centralized inbox for this practice.
He also wrote in one of his recent blog posts:
We also need a government that can be maximally competitive in terms of recruiting and retaining great people. This week we issued a governmentwide memo reaffirming every federal employee’s right to request reasonable accommodations for religious purposes. This memo encourages the use of telework, flexible schedules, and leave to meet reasonable religious needs while maintaining efficient agency operations. We’ve done this previously in other areas – e.g., making sure that federal workers whose partners are stationed in military bases outside of their home office or in cases where employees require medical-related accommodations. It’s part of OPM’s broader effort to restore fairness and common sense to federal HR practices.
Conclusion
The end of the “five things” email initiative reflects OPM’s plans to align its performance management practices with the Trump administration’s broader goals of government efficiency and workforce optimization, as outlined in the February 11, 2025 Executive Order. By emphasizing agency-specific strategies, Kupor has signaled a new direction for OPM—one that prioritizes transparency, innovation, and recognition while maintaining accountability.
