Sources: the Elon Musk-directed OPM email asking federal staff about recent work requested no links or attachments as part of a plan to feed responses into AI
www.nbcnews.com/politics/dog... Matthew Facciani / @matthewfacciani : Potentially firing thousands of people based on AI's analysis of a single brief email is reckless and cruel. — www.nbcnews.com/politics/dog... Kevin Collier / @kevincollier : Some context: Edward “Big Balls” Coristine is listed in CISA's agency directory as a senior advisor. He's been accused by a former employer of leaking information to a competitor. And we learned today that DOGE in some instances is using LLMs to sift through federal staffers' words. @nycsouthpaw : Some AI is going to tell a college age nazi to fire almost every incident and natural disaster response team in the federal government because they didn't have much to do during February 16-23, 2025. [embedded post] Max Kennerly / @maxkennerly : Even accepting LLMs are capable of this task (lol, no), this is set up to fail, to create excuses for arbitrarily firing people. — Nobody was told that was the query; you can't tell “mission-critical” from five bullet points; a snapshot of one week won't tell you that either; the list goes on and on. … @golikehellmachine.com : you can't assess whether a position is valuable or not based on a five bullet point response. no AI can do that. no manager can do that. no executive can do that. that's not how it works. the story should make clear that this is a transparently false pretext for illegally firing federal workers. Chris Geidner / @chrisgeidner : Today's news leading up the “least surprising, most alarming” quadrant of the matrix: [image] Threads: Josh Williams / @jw : Oh yay. Temu Skynet gets to decide who keeps their jobs. Brian Penny / @thebrianpenny : Yes to all this but also...which AI system exactly is being fed lists of precisely what job duties every government employee is performing at any given time, because that is some *very* valuable information, and the AI is going to make a *lot* of unexpected correlations from that. X: Elon Musk / @elonmusk : Consistent with President @realDonaldTrump's instructions, 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. @sbf_ftx : 1) I have a lot of sympathy for gov't employees: I, too, have not checked my email for the past few (hundred) days And I can confirm that being unemployed is a lot less relaxing than it looks Elon Musk / @elonmusk : The email request was utterly trivial, as the standard for passing the test was to type some words and press send! Yet so many failed even that inane test, urged on in some cases by their managers. Have you ever witnessed such INCOMPETENCE and CONTEMPT for how YOUR TAXES are Elon Musk / @elonmusk : Subject to the discretion of the President, they will be given another chance. Failure to respond a second time will result in termination. Matt Walsh / @mattwalshblog : Fire any federal worker who didn't answer the email. Fire any who complained publicly about the email. Fire any who complained privately about the email. Fire any who did anything but cheerfully and promptly answer it. Christopher Stanley / @cstanley : What blows my mind is that people could have taken eight months of pay and done whatever they wanted, but instead, they'd rather complain about writing five bullet points, get fired, and walk away with nothing. Julie Tsirkin / @news_jul : NEWS: Responses to the Musk-directed email to government employees about what work they'd accomplished are expected to be fed into an artificial intelligence system to asses whether those jobs are necessary, sources tell @ckubeNBC @Yamiche @strickdc & me: https://www.nbcnews.com/... Forums: Hacker News : DOGE will use AI to assess the responses of federal workers r/50501 : Elon's Email Demand Is Being Met With ‘Very Rude’ Flood of Spam r/popculturechat : Elon's Email Demand Is Being Met With ‘Very Rude’ Flood of Spam r/ABoringDystopia : DOGE will use AI to assess the responses from federal workers who were told to justify their jobs via email r/nottheonion : DOGE will use AI to assess the responses of federal workers who were told to justify their jobs via email r/economicCollapse : DOGE will use AI to assess the responses of federal workers who were told to justify their jobs via email r/politics : DOGE will use AI to assess the responses of federal workers who were told to justify their jobs via email r/NIH : Saw that coming. I'm beginning to think this guy isn't that smart. r/artificial : One-Minute Daily AI News 2/24/2025 r/politics : Elon's email demand is being met with WITH ‘very rude ’ flood of spam r/Fauxmoi : Elon's email demand is being met with ‘very rude’ flood of spam r/optimistsunitenonazis : Remember the folks who said Musk's techboys would just filter out the non-spam e-mails>? Yeah, they were two dumb for that: Elon's Email Demand Is Being Met With ‘Very Rude’ Flood of Spam r/WeirdGOP : Remember the folks who said Musk's techboys would just filter out the non-spam e-mails>? Yeah, they were two dumb for that: Elon's Email Demand Is Being Met With ‘Very Rude’ Flood of Spam r/nothinghappeninghere : Remember the folks who said Musk's techboys would just filter out the non-spam e-mails>? Yeah, they were two dumb for that: Elon's Email Demand Is Being Met With ‘Very Rude’ Flood of Spam r/Trumpvirus : Remember the folks who said Musk's techboys would just filter out the non-spam e-mails>? Yeah, they were two dumb for that: Elon's Email Demand Is Being Met With ‘Very Rude’ Flood of Spam r/FedEmployees : So AI will filter and compile responses to the “5 Bullet” email... r/democrats : Elon's Email Demand Is Being Met With ‘Very Rude’ Flood of Spam r/ArtificialInteligence : DOGE will use AI to assess the responses from federal workers who were told to justify their jobs via email r/NewsOfTheStupid : DOGE will use AI to assess the responses from federal workers who were told to justify their jobs via email r/politics : Trump appointees appear to contradict Musk for first time in pushback to OPM email r/technology : DOGE will use AI to assess the responses from federal workers who were told to justify their jobs via email r/fednews : DOGE Email what did you do info going into AI to determine job necessity r/OpenAI : DOGE will use AI to assess the responses from federal workers who were told to justify their jobs via email r/1102 : DOGE will use AI to assess the responses from federal workers who were told to justify their jobs via email r/antiwork : DOGE will use AI to assess the responses from federal workers who were told to justify their jobs via email r/moderatepolitics : DOGE will use AI to assess the responses from federal workers who were told to justify their jobs via email r/inthenews : DOGE will use AI to assess the responses from federal workers who were told to justify their jobs via email r/neoliberal : DOGE will use AI to assess the responses from federal workers who were told to justify their jobs via email r/law : Federal workers and agencies push back against Elon Musk's email ultimatum r/NIH : Trump appointees appear to contradict Musk for first time in pushback to OPM email r/law : Trump appointees appear to contradict Musk for first time in pushback to OPM email r/washdc : Trump appointees appear to contradict Musk for first time in pushback to OPM email r/unusual_whales : Trump appointees appear to contradict Musk for first time in pushback to OPM email r/politics : Trump appointees appear to contradict Musk for first time in pushback to OPM email r/fednews : Trump appointees appear to contradict Musk for first time in pushback to OPM email r/Liberal : Trump appointees appear to contradict Musk for first time in pushback to OPM email r/politics : Trump appointees appear to contradict Musk for first time in pushback to OPM email
Context & Ripple Effects
The reported email follows earlier concerns over DOGE-linked access to personnel information, including an OPM server alleged to lack a privacy impact assessment. Its instruction to exclude links and attachments suggests a preference for uniform, machine-readable accounts over the underlying work products.
The episode also sits alongside DOGE's reported move away from Slack while shifting into an office not subject to FOIA, raising the stakes for how personnel-related data and the decisions derived from it can be reviewed.
First-order effects
- Federal employees are asked to compress recent work into text that can be ingested by an AI system, rather than submit supporting records or attachments.
- OPM and DOGE gain a standardized dataset for comparing employees' self-reported work and informing the reported assessment of job necessity.
Second-order effects
- A text-only intake can make nuanced, collaborative, or document-based work harder to evidence, increasing pressure for agencies to define human review and appeal paths before AI-informed personnel decisions are acted on.
- The reported use of staff responses alongside prior concerns about personnel-data handling intensifies scrutiny of OPM's privacy, records-management, and accountability controls.
Third-order effects
- If repeated, this would move AI in government from back-office summarization toward delegated workforce triage—a higher-stakes use that demands operational governance, auditability, and clear human decision ownership.
- DOGE's later reported effort to use AI for large-scale regulatory reduction suggests a broader pattern: standardized government inputs being turned into AI-mediated prioritization across administrative functions, though the scope and safeguards remain uncertain.
The trend: This is one data point in the expansion of operational AI from assisting public-sector analysis to shaping which government work, rules, and roles receive human attention.