“Subject to the discretion of the President, they will be given another chance,” Musk said in a post on X late Monday, hours before a midnight deadline to respond to the initial request. “Failure to respond a second time will result in termination.”
Musk’s position flies in opposition to guidance previously given to agency heads by the Office of Personnel Management, instructing them that two million federal employees were not required to reply to a Musk-led effort to requiring them to list five bullet points of their accomplishments over the past week. The original Musk-initiated email, sent Saturday, listed a deadline to respond by end of day Monday.
Many agencies, including the Department of Defense, the FBI, the Department of State and the Department of Homeland Security instructed workers to refrain from sending individual responses.
Musk on Saturday said that workers who failed to respond to the email would be considered as having resigned. OPM quickly clarified that any next steps would be up to the discretion of each agency, and not Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, a cost-cutting effort housed within the White House.
OPM did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Musk’s latest post calling for terminations of employees who didn’t respond to his second request.
Musk’s latest missive demonstrates the growing power struggle between DOGE, his upstart effort within the government that has sought to quickly cut costs and cull federal workers roles, and President Donald Trump’s allies leading federal agencies.
Musk’s increasingly drastic efforts to put pressure on the federal workforce as part of DOGE’s broad push to scale back the size of the government have drawn protests from employee unions, Democrats in Congress and even constituents in Republican-leaning districts. But the productivity report mandate marked the first significant pushback from within the ranks of Trump allies running the government.
Trump himself defended Musk’s efforts earlier Monday, casting it as a legitimate bid to root out fraud and waste in the government.
“I thought it was great, because we have people that don’t show up to work, and nobody even knows that they work for the government,” Trump said Monday at a meeting with visiting French President Emmanuel Macron. “There was a lot of genius in sending it.”
Trump did not provide any evidence for his claims about federal workers being truant from their jobs or lacking oversight from agency managers
