By Valerie Volcovici. February 22, 2025. 8:36 PM EST.
Summary Musk says non-response by federal workers seen as resignation Emails sent to federal agencies demanding work summaries AFGE union vows to challenge unlawful terminations
I have a good friend who is a federal regulator who works remotely. The department has a few desks in Washington DC that the staff basically rotates through when they do important filings. They are shared by 50-100 people, which is fine because they don’t need them for more than a couple days a year.
The department actually needs the regulators out in the field. They closed most of the field offices to save money, since the work can be done from any computer. The only address is the DC office, which is also significantly downsized.
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Just from a basic logistics perspective, this does not work.
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Making it work would require making thousands of expensive new rentals over months just on the face of it.
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Department of Government “Efficiency”
“All federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week,” Musk posted on X. “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”
Well that sure sounds super fucking illegal!
A comment on /r/FedNews on Reddit says – and this sounds plausible to me – that the goal isn’t actually to get a summary of what workers did, but rather to get a user’s manager, as they are also told to CC: their manager.
According to the commenter, DOGE doesn’t have org charts for the federal government. Apparently that’s not centralized – but if they get an email where each person is sending that, they can extract the header information to build a chart.
I don’t know if that’s actually true – I have kind of a hard time believing that there are no org charts in a format that could be pretty-quickly centralized at least on a department level – but it’s at least plausible to me.
It’d also be a good example of why DOGE set up systems to do direct email access to all employees, to bypass the hierarchy, and it’d explain why they demand a response on very short order (like, they don’t want internal discussion in the organization prior to responses going out).
You give them too much credit, goal is mass firing. They’ll fire everyone that doesn’t respond just to see if it matters.
CC: [fuckyou.list]
Have fun sorting this out.
If you get one of these emails you are here by required to forward it to every email address you know and sign the returning email addresses up for the most heinous spam campaigns you can find. Respond from each email address CCing 1000s of you “supervisors”.
Break their database.
Termination will be taken as direct retaliation. Thanks for the free windfall.
I wish I could invest in a law firm right now. Employment lawyers bout to have a field day.
I thought he’s not in charge?
