Federal employees are largely disregarding weekly emails demanded by President Donald Trump and his billionaire adviser Elon Musk — with many reportedly treating them like a "joke."
The Washington Post obtained government records and spoke with three dozen managers and employees across the government and found many officials refused to comply with the demands to list five accomplishments each week, which Musk insisted was necessary to ensure staffers have a "pulse."
"Some federal agencies have stopped requiring the messages," the Post reported. "A shrinking number of departments mandate strict compliance, while others say they’re requiring the emails but are not checking for compliance or tracking responses in any way that is detectable to some employees. Many federal workers who still answer the message are either churning out lightly modified versions of the same boilerplate each week — or treating the whole thing as a joke, such as by submitting replies in a foreign language."
The tech mogul says he's leaving the government later this year, and his White House influence seems to have waned, but his conflicting directives that first went out Feb. 22 – demanding to know “What did you do last week?” – have resulted in a patchwork of policies covering the responses, and employees remain confused about their purpose.
“Zero idea how it’s used,” said one employee of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
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Employees send the responses on Mondays, if at all, and some supervisors condense responses to send to higher-ranking official.
“Then we do it all again next week,” said an employee at the Defense Department, adding that most colleagues submit slightly altered versions of the same copied-and-pasted text each week. “I don’t know anyone who’s manually creating a new response each week.”
Agriculture Department initially were told not to reply to the email, but then state-level leaders directed staff to forward responses to direct managers, who stopped short of calling the messages mandatory, and many staffers have chosen not to reply, while others have submitted messages in Russian to confuse anyone or anything, such as AI, that's reviewing their responses.
“I have not sent one in at all,” the USDA employee said. “I don’t think I should have to justify my job to some unknown entity, especially when I’m handling private customer information.”