Trump administration ends use of Musk-era ‘5 things’ email
The Trump administration has ended the practice of asking federal workers to outline what they accomplished over the last week in five bullet points, which was started at the direction of former special adviser Elon Musk.
The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) had overseen the responses, which have largely been phased out at various agencies, since February before fully nixing the idea on Tuesday.
“We communicated with agency HR leads that OPM was no longer going to manage the five things process nor utilize it internally. At OPM, we believe that managers are accountable to staying informed about what their team members are working on and have many other existing tools to do so,” OPM Director Scott Kupor said in a statement.
Reuters first reported on the new directive, which is part of the Trump administration moving past some of Musk’s initiatives.
The Tesla CEO left his role in May and soon after had a public and feisty feud with President Trump over his signature “big, beautiful bill” before Congress passed it.
The first request for the five bullet points in February, as part of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency overhaul of the federal government, led to widespread confusion within agencies. Some agency heads told their workers they didn’t have to reply, while some told their staff they should.
Musk at the time said failure to respond to the email would be “taken as a resignation,” which led to blowback. He then argued that by knowing what employees accomplish, the administration will be able to spot “outright fraud.”
OPM then told agency leaders that failure to respond to the email will not be considered a resignation and that workers should consider the email voluntary.
In March, the agency quietly updated a privacy impact assessment on its efforts to email all federal workers, stripping language indicating responses from the staffers were “explicitly voluntary.”
The president defended the emails earlier this year, saying “there was a lot of genius in sending it.”
“We’re trying to find out if people are working and so we’re sending a letter to people, ‘Please tell us what you did last week,'” he told reporters in February. “If people don’t respond, it’s very possible that there is no such person or they’re not working.”