All federal employees received a short email on Saturday afternoon with unusual instructions.

The subject line was “What did you do last week?” Here’s the entirety of the message, which was marked high priority:

Please 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.

Deadline is this Monday at 11:59pmEST.

Employees received the email through their agencies’ Office of Personnel Management (OPM) email list, according to multiples copies of the memo I’ve seen.

But “these emails with directives aren’t sent in the appropriate channel for communication with staff,” one source told me.

“Usually leadership interprets and then sends the interpretation down. This is straight from OPM.”

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According to Elon Musk, the instructions came from President Trump.

And, he wrote in a message on X/Twitter before the email went out, “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”

Crucially, that line was not included in the email itself.

Musk seemed to confirm in a later post that this was the same strategy he employed when he took over Twitter.

The auto-terminations are “deeply illegal,” another source told me, because most federal jobs have legal protections, and some positions are unionized.

It’s not clear who will have access to the responses and what will be done with them.

“It’s getting scarier and scarier,” the first source said.

Update 1: The National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) chapter 282, which represents employees at the Food and Drug Administration, urged members not to respond to the email.

“We are concerned about the implications of this request and are actively working to protect your rights and interests,” the union said in a statement posted to their website on Saturday.

Update 2: The entire NTEU, representing 150,000 federal employees, told all members in an email on Saturday night “NOT to immediately respond” to the OPM email and to “await further guidance.”

The email was an attempt to “scare” federal employees, the NTEU said: “It is shameful.”

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Top image: A protester at the Fork Off Musk rally at U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), February 4, 2025. Photo by Elvert Barnes