WASHINGTON — NASA employees are being advised not to immediately respond to an email sent over the weekend by the Office of Personnel Management despite a threat by Elon Musk that failing to respond would result in losing their jobs.
NASA employees, along with others across the federal government, received an email from OPM Feb. 22 with the subject line “What did you do last week?” The email asked employees to respond with a list of their accomplishments in the last week.
“Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager,” the email stated, adding that they should not provide any links, attachments or classified information. The email gave a deadline of 11:59 p.m. Eastern Feb. 24.
The message came hours after a social media post by Elon Musk, chief executive of SpaceX and de facto leader of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the controversial White House initiative with the stated purpose of cutting government waste.
“Consistent with President @realDonaldTrump’s instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week,” he wrote. “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”
The OPM email, notably, did not include the threat of termination if the recipient did not respond. However, Musk’s post alarmed many federal employees on social media, who both questioned his authority to request that information and wondered what DOGE would do with it.
NASA’s internal response was initially contradictory, according to sources in the agency. Within the Science Mission Directorate, employees initially got a message after the OPM email encouraging them to respond, seeing the request as an opportunity to highlight their activities ahead of major events like the launch of the SPHEREx and PUNCH missions and the Blue Ghost 1 lunar landing.
However, in other parts of NASA, employees were instead requested to withhold responding, pending guidance from agency leadership expected Feb. 24. That included a followup message in the Science Mission Directorate, asking employees to delay their response.
Other federal agencies, from the FBI to the State Department, also urged employees not to immediately respond to the OPM email. Members of Congress pushed back, questioning the authority of OPM to request the information and use it to potentially fire employees.
“The capricious dismissal threatened in Mr. Musk’s post is illegal and cannot be tolerated,” wrote Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, in a letter to Charles Ezell, acting director of OPM.
Musk and OPM, though, appear to have the support of President Donald Trump, who posted on social media a meme of a cartoon character filling out a list that included entries like “Cried about Trump” and “Made it into the office for once.”
Musk later posted on social media that the purpose of the email is to find employees who are not checking email. “In some cases, we believe non-existent people or the identities of dead people are being used to collect paychecks,” he said. He provided no evidence to support that allegation.
Briefings on hold
NASA leaders have provided few public comments on recent events, including anticipated layoffs of probationary civil servants that have been postponed as well as comments by Musk calling for deorbiting the International Space Station years ahead of schedule. NASA has instead released only a few brief statements to reporters.
The agency had planned to hold two media briefings Feb. 24 on the upcoming ISS Expedition 73, one involving NASA and SpaceX officials to talk about the Crew-10 launch currently scheduled for no earlier than March 12 and another involving the astronauts on that mission and fellow NASA astronaut Jonny Kim, who will go to the ISS in March on a Soyuz spacecraft.
However, late Feb. 21 NASA announced it would not conduct those briefings. A mission overview briefing will instead take place after a flight readiness review scheduled for March 7, while the members of Crew-10 will hold a briefing after their arrival at the Kennedy Space Center for the launch. NASA did not give a reason for postponing the briefings.
NASA officials are still scheduled to appear in briefings later this week ahead of the launches of the IM-2 commercial lunar lander mission and the SPHEREx/PUNCH missions.
