The True Purpose of Elon Musk’s Weekend Email Ultimatum to Federal Workers

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Elon Musk’s siege of the federal government entered a new phase late Saturday afternoon, when he announced on X that federal workers would soon be receiving an email “requesting to understand what they got done last week,” adding, quite ominously, “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.” A few hours later, millions of federal workers received the promised email sent from the Office of Personnel Management account hr@opm.gov, the same one Musk used to send his “Fork in the Road” email back on Jan. 28. Understandably, the email sparked immediate panic among federal workers over the next move that might come from Musk, who only days earlier had shown up onstage at the Conservative Political Action Conference wearing sunglasses, slurring his words, and wielding a “chain saw for bureaucracy.” Musk, who is not funny, also used the appearance to complain about “the left’s sense of humor.” It’s unclear why Musk’s “Nonresponse equals resignation” threat doesn’t also appear in the email, but one might plausibly speculate that an attorney intervened, given the Merit Systems Protection Board’s unequivocal finding that a federal worker’s resignation must be “affirmative” and “voluntary,” as a matter of “fundamental fairness and due process.” Of course, the email also declined to even acknowledge Musk’s widely published threat, guaranteeing no small amount of fear, loathing, and confusion among the recipients, a list that evidently includes federal judges and their clerks, and even the FBI, prompting Director Kash Patel to issue a message to his staff to “pause” any response “for now.” Despite the email’s instruction to withhold classified information, encouraging federal workers to describe their jobs in emails sent to Musk’s untested private email server seems at best unwise, from a security and privacy standpoint. In a Privacy Impact Assessment dated Feb. 5, a week after Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team plugged in an untested email server, authors Riccardo Biasini and Greg Hogan, both of DOGE, essentially argued that there was no need to conduct a PIA for its “Government-Wide Email System.” The reason DOGE’s email server should be considered exempt is because the system would be used only for “ the names of federal employees, their government email addresses, and short, voluntary email responses”. But Saturday night’s email from OPM is “voluntary” only if you ignore Musk’s threat from earlier that day, and the responses it invites are open-ended.