Unions Challenge Musk’s Order for Federal Employees to Justify Weekly Work or Face Firing

A coalition of federal unions and advocacy groups amended an existing lawsuit Monday, challenging billionaire Elon Musk’s order for about two million federal employees to explain what they accomplished over the past week or face dismissal.

The email, which was sent on Saturday night, gave federal workers 48 hours to respond. “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation,” Musk claimed in a post announcing the email.

The suit, filed last week on behalf of almost a dozen entities, originally sought to block the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) — essentially the federal government’s HR department — from terminating tens of thousands of federal employees, including National Park Service workers and members of the Small Business Administration.

The original complaint asserted that OPM acted unlawfully by directing federal agencies to use a standardized termination notice falsely claiming performance issues, calling the firings “one of the most massive employment frauds in the history of this country.” 

In the amended complaint, the plaintiffs alleged that OPM violated the Administrative Procedure Act in sending out the performance email, which was titled “What did you do last week?” and labeled as “High Importance.”

They noted that the email, which was not signed by any government official and did not identify the head of agency on whose behalf it was sent, was put out from an email address that had never existed for use by OPM or within the federal government.

“This request, and the resulting confusion, is not just inappropriate – it is disruptive to essential government functions,” Everett Kelley, the president of American Federation of Government Employees, said Sunday in a letter to Charles Ezell, the acting director of OPM.

Trump appointees heading other federal agencies, such as Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and FBI Director Kash Patel, explicitly told their employees to disregard the email. The Departments of Defense, State, Energy, Health and Human Services and Homeland Security also told employees not to respond, the New York Times reported.

Musk announced the email shortly after President Donald Trump said in a post that he wanted the billionaire to be “more aggressive” in his efforts to fire thousands of federal workers. Musk used the same tactic after his 2022 takeover of Twitter, now X.