Elon Musk is considering using artificial intelligence to decide which government employees to let go after they respond to an email asking them to detail their activities from the previous week.
Under the directive of the ‘First Buddy,’ federal workers were instructed to provide a summary of their weekly tasks in five bullet points. The email also warned that those who fail to comply could face termination.
Despite some department heads advising their staff to ignore the directive and a government communication clarifying that participation was voluntary, President Trump supported the initiative, emphasizing its innovative approach.
Responses were due by midnight Monday.
Multiple sources told NBC News that DOGE will take the data from the emails and send them to the advanced AI system Large Language Model (LLM).
LLM will process the data to determine if what each employee is doing is ‘mission-critical.’
No rubric for what the AI would exactly be looking for or if it would depend on a person’s specific function was cited.
DailyMail.com has reached out to both the White House and the Office of Personnel Management.
Trump was at the White House with French President Emmanuel Macron before commenting on Musk’s extraordinary call for feds to justify their existence under threat of termination.
Elon Musk plans to use artificial intelligence to judge federal workers’ response to the DOGE chairman’s ‘what did you do last week?’ email request to determine which employees to fire
The ‘First Buddy’ has sent out a mailer to the remaining civil servants that every federal worker to submit five bullet points on what they did last week – and brandished the threat of firing people who don’t comply
Musk’s move prompted some of the first internal pushback against the DOGE head from inside the Trump administration.
New FBI Director Kash Patel, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and other agency heads told employees to ignore the email.
However, Trump himself called the idea for the email ‘ingenious.’
The email from an HR address at the Office of Personnel Management began arriving in millions of federal employees’ mailboxes on Saturday, setting off uncertainty and conflicting statements from top officials.
Giving his backing on Monday, Trump said: ‘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.
‘If people don’t respond, it’s very possible that there is no such person or they’re not working,. And then if you don’t answer, like you’re sort of semi-fired, or you’re fired, because a lot of people are not answering because they don’t even exist.’
Musk had posted on his X platform Saturday: ‘All federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week. Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.’
Trump appeared to back up Musk’s threat to fire people if they don’t comply.
Musk spent millions helping to get Trump elected and now heads the Department of Governmental Efficiency, which is combing agencies for data and pushing for firings to reduce the size of the bureaucracy.
If people don’t respond, it’s very possible that there is no such person or they’re not working,’ President Donald Trump said while defending Musk’s post and the email to millions of federal workers
The President also connected the issue to his plan to visit Fort Knox to inspect U.S. gold supplies, a probe also pushed by Musk.
‘Are we paying other people that aren’t working…Where’s the money gone? We have found hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud so far, and we’ve just started,’ he said.
‘We’re actually going to Fort Knox to see if the gold is there, because maybe somebody stole the gold – tons of gold,’ Trump said.
There is no evidence that the 147.3 million troy ounces of gold stored at the U.S. Bullion Depository in Fort Knox, Kentucky has been stolen,.
Trump’s Treasury secretary said last week there are annual audits, and there have been occasional high-profile visits.
Musk’s weekend email request rattled federal workers, who are already contending with firings of thousands of ‘provisional’ employees – those who joined the workforce in the last year or two who don’t have the same protections of more senior workers.
One Pentagon official called it ‘the silliest thing I’ve seen in 40 years’ and said it ‘completely usurps the chain of command.’
The email from the OPM did not contain the firing threat. ‘Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager,’ it said.
Adding still more confusion to the situation as a Monday midnight deadline approached, OPM told agency leaders that a failure to respond would not constitute resignation, the Hill reported.
Rep. Gerry Connolly, the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, called on OPM to clarify that failure to respond does not constitute resignation.
Must posted the email demand on Saturday, after a week when federal agencies fired thousands of provisional workers
Musk is also threatening to force out people who refuse to return to the office
The move drew pushback from employee unions
Musk’s email was titled ‘What did you do last week?’
The email came from the human resources department at OPM, but some federal workers tell DailyMail.com that not all of their colleagues have received the message
The billionaire Tesla founder revealed on Sunday he was simply eager ‘to see who had a pulse and two working neurons’ amid concerns that some government workers have it so good that they don’t even check their emails
‘This threat is illegal, reckless, and yet another example of the cruel and arbitrary chaos Mr. Musk is inflicting on the people’s government and its dedicated public servants,’ wrote Connolly, whose Virginia district includes many federal employees.
Patel told FBI employees to ‘pause any responses.’
Other agencies telling their workers not to respond include the State Department, the Dense Department, the National Security Agency, and others.
In contrast, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy published his own five-point list of accomplishments, after a week where a Delta flight had a fiery upside down crash landing in Toronto.
Trump himself appeared to carve out an exception for classified information, while papering over any tensions between agency heads and Musk.
‘That was done in a friendly manner – only things such as perhaps Marco [Rubio] at State Department, where they have very confidential things, or the FBI, where they’re working on confidential things. And they don’t mean that in any way combative with Elon. They’re just saying there are some people that you don’t want to really have them tell you what they’re working on last week. But other than that, I think everyone thought it was a pretty ingenious idea,’ Trump said.
