Defense Department Burns Elon Musk With Defiant Statement on X Telling Employees to Ignore His Email Demand to Justify Their Jobs

AP Photo/Alex Brandon

The email Elon Musk directed to be sent to all federal employees is getting pushback from President Donald Trump’s appointed agency heads, notably including the Department of Defense, which posted a statement on Musk’s own social media platform instructing its employees to ignore the email for now.

The email from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) was sent late Saturday evening demanding that the federal employees defend their continued employment. “What did you do last week?” read the subject line, and the text of the email instructed recipients to “reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager…Please do not send any classified information, links, or attachments.” The deadline was set at 11:59 pm ET Monday evening.

Musk tweeted that the email was being sent to “all federal employees” and threatened consequences for noncompliance. “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation,” he wrote.

But multiple Trump Cabinet picks and other appointees have instructed those who report to them to ignore the email or provide only limited responses.

“FBI personnel may have received an email from OPM requesting information,” wrote FBI Director Kash Patel. “The FBI, through the Office of the Director, is in charge of all of our review processes, and will conduct reviews in accordance with FBI procedures. When and if further information is required, we will coordinate the responses. For now, please pause any responses.”

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was one who did email employees to say that the OPM email was “legitimate” and instruct them to “read and respond per the instructions” by the Monday evening deadline. However, one agency under HHS took the opposite stance. Matthew Memoli, the acting director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), emailed his team to tell them to “please hold on responding until we receive further guidance.”

The Washington Post’s Carol Leonnig reported that Secret Service managers suggested broad language for agents to use to reply to the email in order to avoid disclosing “sensitive and classified details of their work.” The Post’s reporting listed the State Department, National Security Agency, the Defense Information Systems Agency and the National Science Foundation (an Air Force division), the director’s office of the Administrative Office of U.S. Courts (manages the federal judiciary staff), NASA, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention among the agencies telling their staff to hold off on responding.

The Department of Defense can be counted among this group, tweeting a statement on X — Musk’s own platform — with a statement that was captioned, “Defense Department Statement on OPM Mail Guidance.”

The statement read:

DoD personnel may have received an email from OPM requesting information. The Department of Defense is responsible for reviewing the performance of its personnel and it will conduct any review in accordance with its own procedures. When and if required, the Department will coordinate responses to the email you have received from OPM. For now, please pause any response to the OPM
email titled “What did you do last week.”

Darin S. Selnick Performing the Duties of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness

A little more than an hour before this statement was posted, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted a tweet encouraging his followers to also follow the @DODResponse account “for all the intel you need on the Department of Defense!”

That @DODResponse account retweeted the statement posted by the @DeptofDefense account.

Screenshot via X.

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