Federal workers are challenging a government agency’s policy in a newly amended lawsuit filed on Sunday after Elon Musk said that if employees do not respond to an email demanding to know what they did the previous week, it will be taken as resignation.
In an email labeled “high importance,” the Office of Personnel Management asked federal workers across all government agencies on Saturday to reply with approximately five bullet points stating what they accomplished last week. The email asked workers to respond before midnight on the following Monday. It also told them to refrain from sending any classified information, links or attachments and to copy their managers.
The American Federation of Government Employees, along with a number of other unions representing federal workers, allege in the lawsuit that the OPM email violated the law. The allegations echo the AFGE’s statements in a letter to the OPM it also sent on Sunday.
The coalition of unions says the OPM did not comply with any procedural requirements in order to implement the new policy, claiming the office failed to publish a notice “in the Federal Register or anywhere else.”
The original lawsuit, filed last week in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, challenged the OPM’s “assembly-line fashion” firing of probationary employees.
The new filing now mentions the email, which was sent to tens of thousands of government employees on Saturday. It also cites an X post by Musk, who leads Trump’s “Department of Government Efficiency” initiative, as evidence that a policy change was made.
In the post, Musk wrote that “failure to respond” to the email would be “taken as resignation.”
Though the lawsuit references his social media post, Musk is not named as a defendant in the suit.
Neither the White House nor the OPM immediately responded to a request for comment from HuffPost. However, President Donald Trump told reporters during a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday that there was “a lot of genius” involved in Musk’s threat.
“So by asking the question, tell us what you did this week… what he’s doing is saying, ‘Are you actually working?’” Trump said. “And then, if you don’t answer, like, you’re sort of semi-fired, or get fired, because a lot of people are not answering because they don’t even exist.”
Some agencies, including the FBI, Defense Department and State Department, have instructed workers not to respond to the email. Meanwhile, the Department of Veterans Affairs said otherwise, stating, “the email is valid.”
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Union leaders are now asking the court to pause the federal firings and the “What did you do last week” policy.