Elon Musk told federal workers on Saturday that they must respond to an email by summarizing their accomplishments for the week, repeating a tactic he used to cull the work force at his social media company.
“Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished this week and cc your manager,” said the message, which was sent to federal employees on Saturday afternoon and seen by The New York Times.
Mr. Musk has repeatedly drawn inspiration from his 2022 takeover of X, then known as Twitter, as he works to overhaul the federal government with his so-called Department of Government Efficiency. With the support of the Trump administration, Mr. Musk has ordered layoffs across the federal government and effectively shuttered several agencies.
“Elon is doing a great job, but I would like to see him be more aggressive,” Mr. Trump said in a post Saturday on Truth Social.
Mr. Musk quickly accepted the challenge. “All federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week,” Mr. Musk wrote in a social media post on Saturday, saying his actions were “consistent” with the president’s demands. “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation,” he added.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the email to federal workers.
The approach echoed one Mr. Musk took with executives and employees at Twitter. In April 2022, Mr. Musk was set to join the board at the social media company, but bickered with Parag Agrawal, its chief executive at the time, over his public criticism of the company. When Mr. Agrawal asked Mr. Musk not to post detrimental things about Twitter, Mr. Musk responded in a text, “What did you get done this week?” and then told Mr. Agrawal he would buy Twitter outright.
The exchange led to Mr. Musk’s $44 billion takeover of the company, which he completed in October 2022. Mr. Musk claimed he fired Mr. Agrawal immediately, although Mr. Agrawal contested the circumstances of his departure and sued Mr. Musk for withholding severance payments.
Shortly after the acquisition, Mr. Musk told employees to print out code they had written recently — an exercise intended to prove how hard they worked.
On Saturday, Mr. Musk acknowledged the similarities. “Parag got nothing done. Parag was fired,” he wrote in an X post about the message he intended to send to federal workers.
In response to Mr. Musk’s posts, the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal employee union, said it would challenge any “unlawful” terminations.
“Once again, Elon Musk and the Trump administration have shown their utter disdain for federal employees and the critical services they provide to the American people,” Everett Kelley, the union’s president, said in a statement.
“It is cruel and disrespectful,” he said, “to hundreds of thousands of veterans who are wearing their second uniform in the civil service to be forced to justify their job duties to this out-of-touch, privileged, unelected billionaire who has never performed one single hour of honest public service in his life.”
Nicholas Nehamas, Maggie Haberman, Erica L. Green, Eileen Sullivan, Margot Sanger-Katz, Edward Wong, Mark Walker, Kennedy Elliott, Lisa Friedman and Matthew Goldstein contributed reporting.
