The US Department of Health and Human Services delivered an ominous warning to employees about responding to a Department of Government Efficiency email asking what they did last week.
The Office of Personnel Management sent out the email to all federal employees on Saturday, saying they must reply with a list of five accomplishments by Monday at 11.59pm or face termination.
But a growing number of federal agencies told their employees to ignore the email, and by Monday, the Trump administration told agency heads it wasn’t mandatory – even as he praised Musk’s work at the agency.
The Department of Health and Human Services has since told employees that if they chose to reply to Elon Musk’s directive to send a list of accomplishments, they should assume it will be read by ‘malign foreign actors,’ according to Fox News.
‘In discussions with OPM officials yesterday and today, OPM has now rescinded that mandatory requirement,’ it wrote.
‘There is no HHS expectation that HHS employees respond to OPM and there is no impact to your employment with the agency if you choose not to respond.’
Should employees choose to respond, though, the department provided guidelines – including responding by the deadline and keeping responses as general as possible.
It said the workers should describe their work in a way that protects sensitive data, and does not include any information that could identify others in the agency or could identify specific grants or contracts.
If they are engaged in scientific research, they were told not to provide any information detailing the precise nature of their work, the department heads urged.
‘Assume that what you write will be read by malign foreign actors and tailor your responses accordingly,’ it warned.
The email came as it was revealed that Musk plans to use artificial intelligence to determine which federal workers to fire after they submit their responses.
Multiple sources told NBC News that DOGE will take the data from the emails and send them to an advanced AI system.
The system will then process the data to determine if what each employee is doing is ‘mission-critical.’
No rubric for what the AI would exactly be looking for or if it would depend on a person’s specific function was cited.
Yet OPM told human resources officials from federal agencies that it won’t take a one-size-fits-all approach to the responses, and the administration would instead work with the individual departments to account for the workers.
The Trump administration also announced on Monday that the deadline for responses would be pushed back, though Musk warned: ‘Failure to respond a second time will result in termination.’
The move came after newly-appointed FBI Director Kash Patel, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and other agency heads told employees to ignore the directive.
As the backlash mounted, Musk took to X on Monday night to respond to a post angry with the ‘meltdown’ civil employees were having over the request.
‘The email request was utterly trivial, as the standard for passing the test was to type some words and press send! Yet so many failed even that inane test, urged on in some cases by their managers,’ he wrote.
‘Have you ever witnessed such INCOMPETENCE and CONTEMPT for how YOUR TAXES are being spent?’
President Donald Trump also called the idea for the email ‘ingenious.’
‘We’re trying to find out if people are working, and so we’re sending a letter to people: Please tell us what you did last week.
‘If people don’t respond, it’s very possible that there is no such person or they’re not working,. And then if you don’t answer, like you’re sort of semi-fired, or you’re fired, because a lot of people are not answering because they don’t even exist.’
Still, Trump appeared to carve out an exception for classified information, while papering over any tensions between agency heads and Musk.
‘That was done in a friendly manner – only things such as perhaps Marco [Rubio] at State Department, where they have very confidential things, or the FBI, where they’re working on confidential things,’ the president said, days before he is set to convene his first full cabinet meeting of his second term.
‘And they don’t mean that in any way combative with Elon. They’re just saying there are some people that you don’t want to really have them tell you what they’re working on last week.
‘But other than that, I think everyone thought it was a pretty ingenious idea.’