Federal Worker Unions Blast Musk Demand for Staff Task Lists (1)

Federal worker unions denounced billionaire Elon Musk‘s directive that government employees respond to an email by Monday asking them what they “accomplished” last week.

The message is “un-American,” Doreen Greenwald, national president of the National Treasury Employees Union, said in a statement.

Musk on Saturday wrote on his social media platform X that any failure to respond would be “taken as a resignation.” Federal employees across government agencies reported receiving a message the same day from hr@opm.gov asking for five examples of their work by Monday at 11:59 p.m. ET.

“Make no mistake, we will show up to our jobs on Monday and continue doing the work necessary to keep this nation running,” Greenwald said.

The American Federation of Government Employees will challenge “any unlawful terminations” in court, national president Everett Kelley said in a statement.

“There is no known authority for Mr. Musk to make this claim,” the union wrote in a message to its members.

The Office of Personnel Management’s actions “conflict with laws delegating the authority for the management of federal employees to their respective agencies,” Kelley separately wrote Sunday in a letter to OPM Acting Director Charles Ezell. He added that the demand doesn’t comply with the agency’s own rules and guidance.

“We believe that employees have no obligation to respond to this plainly unlawful email absent lawful direction,” Kelley wrote, requesting a rescission of the message and an apology to federal employees.

AFGE represents more than 800,000 federal employees. NTEU represents about 150,000 federal employees, according to the union.

The message followed the Trump administration’s firing of nearly 30,000 federal employees in the last two weeks, according to a Bloomberg Law analysis of news reports. The US government employed 2.2 million civilian workers at the start of Trump’s second term, the vast majority of whom work outside the Washington, D.C., region.

OPM, the federal government’s HR division, set up hr@opm.gov after Trump took office. The new address allows senior Trump administration officials to communicate directly with staff across the government, rather than relying on managers to distribute information.

The Trump administration used it to offer employees the option to quit voluntarily and keep their pay through Sept. 30. More than 75,000 employees signed on, OPM said earlier in February. The office called the offer the “Fork in the Road.”

A federal judge on Feb. 17 said OPM can continue using the government-wide email system to communicate with federal workers, after two anonymous employees sued to stop it.

The agency told the court that emails sent to federal employees using the new address would explicitly state that responses would be voluntary. The email sent Saturday didn’t include such language.

OPM didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.