What to know about Elon Musk’s email ultimatum for federal workers
Elon Musk instructed federal workers to email a list of five tasks completed last week or resign. Here are five things to know about the ultimatum.
What appears to be DOGE’s latest attempt to cut government spending may be new for the federal government, but the “slash and burn” layoff strategy was ripped straight out of the private sector’s playbook, according to a Havard expert.
After thousands of government layoffs, the Office of Personnel Management on Saturday directed federal workers to email a list of roughly five accomplishments from the previous week by 11:59 p.m. EST Monday. Elon Musk, the unofficial leader of DOGE, or the Department of Government Efficiency, on X said failure to respond would be taken as a resignation.
OPM on Monday told workers a response is voluntary after the email spurred backlash from federal agencies. But for private companies, rapid job cuts in this fashion “happen all the time,” according to Joseph Fuller, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School.
“This is usually emergency turnaround kind of stuff” from companies, Fuller said, which “seems the way the administration views a lot of this.”
Stealing from the private sector’s playbook
Fuller said companies have long turned to mass layoffs as a way to reduce costs.
Sometimes employees are directed to defend the value they add to the company, he said. Another technique is to have employees reapply for their current job to weed out workers with dated skill sets.
It’s not a strategy with “the greatest accuracy and equity,” Fuller said, adding that he doesn’t recommend this approach to most organizations. “But when you’re involved in short-term emergency cost reductions, unfortunately, people do resort to this, in part because they just don’t have the time to do it in a more transparent and thoughtful fashion.”
Fuller called it a “blunt instrument” wielded by companies in duress that are hoping for a quick turnaround. That seems to be how Musk and President Donald Trump view the government, he said.
Musk ‒ a defense contractor who has faced questions on whether his business interests pose a conflict of interest with his role in DOGE ‒ has accused the government of “staggering” amounts of waste, and said the layoffs are meant to shift people “from low productivity jobs in government to high productivity jobs in industry.”
Trump claimed “billions and billions of waste, fraud and abuse” has been uncovered by DOGE, although Musk has struggled to produce receipts showing his cost-cutting has saved the $55 billion he initially claimed.
Musk’s history with job cuts
It’s not the first time Musk ‒ CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and the owner of X ‒ has threatened jobs via email.
In 2022, Musk sent an email demanding Tesla employees return to the office, warning that failure to comply would be considered a resignation, according to Reuters. That same year, shortly after Musk’s takeover of Twitter, he said employees must work “long hours at high intensity” or leave, asking staff to commit by clicking on a link by deadline, according to Reuters.
“Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade,” Musk said in an email.
A January U.S. Office of Personnel Management email to federal workers with the subject line “The Fork in the road” also mirrored Musk’s actions at X, who used the same subject line when giving Twitter employees a similar ultimatum.
The emailed demands are “very specific to Elon Musk,” said University of Pittsburgh law professor J.S. Nelson, a co-author of “Business Ethics: What Everyone Needs to Know.”
“Musk has always been an outlier, in many ways,” she told USA TODAY. “I don’t think this is what you do in the private sector, traditionally.”
Musk’s approach to corporate layoffs may not be so easily applied to federal agencies, which pushed back against the email’s demands.
Federal workers tend to have “pretty widespread protections” that are more generous than those in the private sector, Fuller said. Unions, lawmakers and legal experts have questioned whether Musk has the legal basis to carry out the firings.
Musk on Monday said the email demand was “basically a check to see if the employee had a pulse and was capable of replying to an email,” with a “lot of people in for a rude awakening.”
