A newly amended lawsuit challenges a threat by Elon Musk to federal workers, which warned them over social media to respond to an email demanding them to submit a list of their accomplishments over the last week by Monday, or face a forced “resignation.”
The amended suit filed Sunday in San Francisco federal court comes amid confusion and controversy inside the federal government over whether employees must respond to that email from the Office of Personnel Management, and, if so, how.
Musk, the CEO of Tesla and leader of several other companies, has been tasked by President Donald Trump with cutting federal government spending, and the number of federal workers. That effort is known as DOGE, which stands for Department of Government Efficiency.
The original lawsuit was filed Wednesday by a group of unions representing federal workers against OPM and acting OPM director Charles Ezell. The suit asks a judge to enjoin OPM from terminating “tens of thousands of federal employees in contravention of federal constitutional and statutory law.”
The suit was amended in reaction to OPM’s implementation of a “new mandatory reporting program for all federal employees throughout the federal government,” the complaint notes.
Before Saturday, federal workers were not required to submit any reports on their work to OPM.
But on Saturday, employees throughout the government, “employed at many different agencies, received the same email,” from a new OPM email address, with the title, “What did you do last week?” the suit notes.
“The body of the email stated: Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager,” the email said. “Deadline is this Monday at 11:59 EST.”
Musk on Saturday tweeted about the email on his social media site X.
“Consistent with President @realDonaldTrump’s instructions, all federal
employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week,” Musk wrote.
“Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation,” Musk added in that tweet.
The amended lawsuit challenging the terminations by the Trump administration says that before Saturday, “:no notice was published, in the Federal Register or anywhere else, regarding any OPM program, rule, policy, or regulation requiring all federal employees to provide a report regarding their work to OPM.”
The suit says that OPM “has not complied with any procedural requirements … with respect to this new program.”
And, the suit, noted, after OPM sent out the blast email to federal workers on Saturday, “at least some federal agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, began telling their employees not to respond to this OPM surprise request.”
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