Musk's Office Keeps Pushing 'What Did You Do Last Week?' Emails

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Even with a lot of pushback, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has kept on asking workers for their weekly wins. They’re not backing down anytime soon.

According to The New York Times, fresh emails from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) hit the workers' inboxes on Friday, asking them to send quick, bullet-point updates about their work every week. The messages, with the subject line "What did you do last week? Part II," stated that the reports are due every Monday night by 11:59 p.m. ET. Classic Monday night deadline, right?

The latest email wasn’t just a repeat of the first, sent roughly a week ago. This time, an amendment told employees who work on classified or sensitive activities to respond with "all of my activities are sensitive."

At first, Musk argued that the emails were a simple task anyone could do in minutes. Later, he changed his tune, claiming the emails would help weed out fraud and identify dead or non-existent people who might still be collecting a paycheck. President Trump has echoed this, too. But so far, neither Musk nor Trump have given any solid proof.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters earlier this week that “more than 1 million workers” replied to DOGE’s original email, despite the federal workforce consisting of 2.4 million people, according to White House data. It's unclear if the administration confirmed that the responses came from actual employees, especially since people online claimed to have sent bogus "what I did last week" emails to mess with the system.

On X, Musk said that people who don’t reply to the emails will be fired, though neither OPM email included that threat. (Trump seems to be unsure; "And it’s possible that a lot of those people will be actually fired," he said last week.) Looks like someone might have missed that part of the email.

Many of the largest federal agencies, including the FBI, State Department, and Pentagon, instructed employees to ignore DOGE’s request, citing security. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has since told employees to respond, starting next week, DefenseScoop reports. "Non-compliance may lead to further review," he wrote. Guess ignoring it isn’t an option anymore.

On Thursday night, a federal judge ruled that OPM “does not have any authority whatsoever, under any statute — in the history of the universe — to hire and fire employees within another agency.” Seems like someone’s authority just ran out.

Meanwhile, Senator Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) said the emails were sent to employees of the legislative branch, despite them "not being subject to personnel actions by the executive branch." This, he said, is proof of DOGE’s “uninformed, poorly executed, and chaotic manner.” Looks like DOGE might need a new plan.