Federal workers started to receive emails late Friday evening asking them to provide a list of accomplishments from the week, a reprise of a request by Elon Musk that spread fear and confusion through the government just days ago.
Workers at various departments received the email from the Office of Personnel Management, including Defense, Labor and Agriculture, according to copies of emails seen by The New York Times.
The email, titled “What did you do last week? Part II,” echoed an email sent to federal workers last weekend that instructed them to reply with a list of about five accomplishments from their workweek. That blast came shortly after Mr. Musk, the billionaire President Trump has assigned to shrink the federal work force, said on social media that it would be coming — and that failure to respond would be “taken as a resignation.”
The message sent out to workers on Friday similarly instructed them to send approximately five bullets describing what they achieved this week. It also said that, going forward, employees would be expected to complete the task weekly by Monday at 11:59 p.m. Eastern time.
There were slight differences from the first email. This time, employees who worked only on classified or sensitive activities were instructed to write “all of my activities are sensitive” in response.
Although Mr. Musk said he was acting at the encouragement of Mr. Trump, the original directive sowed chaos and led to mass confusion across the federal government.
In some cases, federal employees do not have access to their government email when they are not working. Some managers instructed employees to respond, while others told them not to. Privately, some agency leaders worried that complying with Mr. Musk’s orders could result in employees revealing national security secrets and other sensitive information. By Monday afternoon, the Office of Personnel Management informed agencies that they did not have to require employees to respond to the original email requesting details of their workweek.
Recent legal challenges have tested the limits of the power that the Office of Personnel Management, the government’s human resources arm, wields over the federal civilian work force, which is made up of roughly 2.3 million people. On Thursday night, a federal judge ruled that the agency had exceeded its authority when it issued memos outlining steps to fire most federal workers on probation.
“Congress has given the authority to hire and fire to the agencies themselves,” Judge William Alsup of the Northern District of California said. “The Office of Personnel Management does not have any authority whatsoever, under any statute — in the history of the universe — to hire and fire employees within another agency.”
Earlier this week, Mr. Musk explained why he wanted federal employees to fulfill his order to detail their work.
“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,” Mr. Musk said during a cabinet meeting on Wednesday. “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.”
Greg Jaffe, Nicholas Nehamas and Zach Montague contributed reporting.
