Judiciary Tells Judges, Staff to Ignore Email to Explain Work

The federal judiciary told staffers not to respond to a Trump administration email asking them to account for their work last week.

The Administrative Office of the US Courts said some judges and judiciary staff had received an email from the executive branch’s Office of Personnel Management directing individuals to reply with five accomplishments from the week prior, according to a Saturday evening email blast sent across the judiciary obtained by Bloomberg Law.

The judiciary office said they “suggest that no action be taken.”

“We will be communicating with OPM about this email, and we appreciate your patience and understanding,” the email said.

Spokespeople for the Administrative Office of the US Courts and Office of Personnel Management didn’t return requests for comment.

The OPM email, previewed by a post on X by Elon Musk, was sent across the federal government Saturday asking employees to explain their jobs by Monday night.

The emails to judges and federal court employees could represent an improper intrusion into the judiciary by the executive branch, in breach of the Constitution’s mandated separation of powers.

Federal district judge serve out lifetime appointments and are intended to act as a constitutional check on executive power. Judges’ salaries are protected by the Constitution, though Congress funds parts of the judiciary, including chambers staff, through the annual appropriations process.

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., where dozens of lawsuits against Donald Trump’s actions have been filed, told Bloomberg Law at least one judge and some clerks on that court had received the email.

Chief Judge Randy Crane of the US District Court for the Southern District of Texas said “many of our employees” had reported getting it.

Separation of Powers

David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor and former ACLU national legal director, said the executive branch doesn’t have any authority over the judiciary.

“One hopes this was just an unintentional mistake,” Cole said by email. “If not, it reflects a fundamental failure to understand the first thing about the separation of powers.”

Any effort by the executive to learn more about the internal workings of the judiciary, where challenges to a number of the Trump administration’s executive orders are pending, “would be a profoundly significant violation of an internal judicial process,” said Max Stearns, a professor at the University of Maryland’s law school who studies constitutional law.

“The idea that the executive branch should have some entitlement to progress reports from the internal workings of an Article III judicial chamber, especially at a time when these chambers are resolving pending matters, precisely involving a series of executive orders from the White House, is as profound a violation of separation of powers as one could conceivably imagine,” Stearns said.

The emails are part of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency’s effort to slash federal spending. The unit has axed thousands of federal workers in recent weeks.

Musk, who’s leading the effort, posted on the social media platform X on Saturday that all federal employees would receive an email soon “requesting to understand what they got done last week,” that “failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”