Federal workers will receive another email after Musk’s bullet-point demand. This time they might have to respond

Sign up for the daily Inside Washington email for exclusive US coverage and analysis sent to your inbox Get our free Inside Washington email Get our free Inside Washington email SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. open image in gallery Elon Musk attended Donald Trump’s first cabinet meeting at the White House this week The second iteration is expected to be sent out from addresses associated with the chiefs of agency HR departments, rather than a blanket pan-government mailout from hr@opm.gov, the newspaper adds. open image in gallery US Representative Kweisi Mfume, Democrat of Maryland, holds a sign against DOGE at the US Capitol in Washington, DC In practice, the approach met with a highly mixed response – even from Trump loyalists like Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard – with agencies including the FBI, the State Department and the Pentagon instructing their employees to simply ignore the message while some of those who did submit answers took the opportunity to send in rude and offensive diatribes attacking Musk and DOGE. The confusion was perhaps best summed up, inadvertently, by Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, who told his staff on Sunday: “Let me clarify: We will comply with this OPM request whether by replying or deciding not to reply.” When the White House eventually directed agency heads that Musk’s order was not binding, the billionaire backed down, extending the deadline and leaving enforcement to the president’s discretion. When he appeared at Trump’s first cabinet meeting on Wednesday, Musk told the assembled secretaries that the email had been “misinterpreted as a performance review” when it was intended to be a “pulse-check review.” “We think there are a number of people on the government payroll who are dead, which is probably why they can’t respond, and some people who are not real people,” he claimed.