Elon Musk makes an admission about the productivity email his group sent to federal workers

Department of Government Efficiency head says he wants to test whether federal employees are ‘capable of replying to an email’. Elon Musk said that blanket emails sent to federal employees asking for a response about their weekly accomplishments or risk termination was a test to see if they “had a pulse.”.

The tech billionaire, tasked by President Donald Trump to slash bureaucracy and federal spending through his Department of Government Efficiency, wrote on his X platform Friday that all government staff would receive an email requesting specifics of what they had achieved last week.

Workers reportedly received the email Saturday afternoon from the Office of Personnel Management with the subject line “What did you do last week?” The deadline given to respond, according to emails reviewed by Reuters, was 11:59 p.m. EST on Monday. Failure to reply would be “taken as resignation,” Musk tweeted.

Less than 24 hours before the deadline, Musk hinted that the emails were simply a rouse to ensure federal employees were “capable of responding” to his correspondence. In the early hours of Monday morning, Musk replied to American venture capitalist Garry Tan on X after he shared a post claiming that DOGE wouldn’t be capable of reading all of the federal workers’ responses, calling the initiative “stupid” and “performance art.”.

“Most people don’t understand LLMs have changed the nature of management already, and this will be a bit of a shock to people,” Tan tweeted on Sunday night, speaking of large language models: a type of machine learning model designed for processing large data sets of text.

Musk responded that LLMs would not be needed for his task. “This was basically a check to see if the employee had a pulse and was capable of replying to an email,” Musk said. “This mess will get sorted out this week. Lot of people in for a rude awakening and strong dose of reality. They don’t get it yet, but they will.”.

On Sunday afternoon, Musk also referred to the emails as a “very basic pulse check.” That evening, Musk added that a response was indicative that employees have “two working neurons.”. As of Saturday night, employees at several agencies — including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — had received the emails, Reuters reports.

When asked for comment, an OPM spokesperson told The Independent that “agencies will determine any next steps” after employees respond. "As part of the Trump Administration's commitment to an efficient and accountable federal workforce, OPM is asking employees to provide a brief summary of what they did last week by the end of Monday, CC'ing their manager,” the spokesperson said.

A rift emerged on Sunday evening between Trump’s agency heads and Musk after leaders at the FBI, Pentagon, State Department, Department of Homeland Security and Department of Energy instructed staff not to reply to the OPM’s email. Some managers, including at the Department of Health and Human Services, instructed workers to comply with the request to send a list of five accomplishments from the past week to a generic government email address, only to later reverse course. While others simply told their staff to wait until Monday — and not to reply to the note before then.

“EXTREMELY troubling that some parts of government think this is TOO MUCH!!” Musk tweeted on Sunday. “What is wrong with them??”. Senior officials worked to provide employees guidance on how they should proceed, including freshly-confirmed FBI director Kash Patel urging employees to “pause responses.”.