Government jobs the world over are thought to be cushy and low-stress, but things change when Elon Musk is your boss.
Elon Musk has asked all US government employees to send an email detailing the things they’ve achieved in the last week. Musk says that those that don’t send the mail will be deemed to have resigned. Musk is heading DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, which seeks to reduce waste and fraud in the US administration.
“Consistent with President Donald Trump’s instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week. Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation,” Musk posted on X.
Soon images began floating around X of these emails. The email is titled “What did you do last week”, and is marked as important. “Please reply to this email with approx 5 bullet points of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager,” the email said.
“Please do not send any classified information, links or attachments. Deadline is this Monday at 11:59 pm EST,” the mail concluded.
The “what did you get done this week” first came into prominence when Elon Musk was looking to take over Twitter, and was texting then-Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal. Musk had implied that Twitter was too slow and bureaucratic, and in a text message that was later leaked, had asked Agrawal “What did you get done this week?”. This line had been picked up by the tech community as a means to keep themselves accountable for their productivity, and many tech executives on X had said that they’d begun employing the mantra with themselves and their teams to determine if they were being productive enough. Musk had also sent a similar email to X employees, before laying off nearly 80 percent of them.
Musk, though, has now taken his radical productivity strategy to the federal government. This isn’t something that government employees are used to — government employees don’t have the reputation of working particularly hard, or achieving enough things to be able to put together 5 bullet points on what they’d done in a week. Musk has been criticizing the US government employees as being inefficient and not showing up to work — many government employees have been working from home since the pandemic. Musk has also been looking to get employees to voluntarily quit, offering 8 months of salaries to government employees who resigned. But with Musk now asking all employees to send in emails about what they achieved in the previous week, he could be laying the ground for a large layoff at the US federal government.