- More than one million federal employees replied to DOGE’s productivity email.
- That is less than half of the federal government, which employs over 2.4 million people.
- The initial email request was met with confusion, with some agencies telling staff not to respond.
The White House said on Tuesday that less than half of all federal employees responded to an email from the Office of Personnel Management asking them to send in a list of their accomplishments.
“I can announce that we have had more than one million workers who have chosen to participate in this very simple task of, again, sending five bullet points to your direct supervisor or manager, cc’ing OPM,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters.
“All federal workers should be working at the same pace that President Trump is working and moving,” Leavitt added.
The federal government employs more than 2.4 million people.
The Department of Government Efficiency’s first deadline for workers to send in bullet-point summaries passed at 11:59 p.m. ET on Monday.
The initial request for responses from all federal workers came via a memo from the OPM on Saturday. DOGE leader Elon Musk said on the same day that failure to respond by the deadline “will be taken as a resignation.”
Musk appeared to walk back this ultimatum on Monday. He wrote in an X post that federal workers will be given “another chance” if they have not emailed in their list of accomplishments yet.
“Failure to respond a second time will result in termination,” Musk wrote.
The DOGE email request was met with confusion and conflicting guidance across the government.
At least eight agencies, including the Department of Defense, the State Department, and the Department of Health and Human Services, said their workers didn’t have to respond to OPM’s email.
President Donald Trump has publicly backed Musk and DOGE’s move, and on Monday told reporters that he thinks the OPM email request is a “pretty ingenious idea.”
“So by asking the question, ‘Tell us what you did this week,’ what he’s doing is saying, ‘Are you actually working?'” Trump told reporters. “And then, if you don’t answer, you are sort of semi-fired, or you’re fired.”
Musk first pitched the idea of having a government-efficiency commission to Trump during a livestreamed conversation on X in August. Musk told Trump then that he’d be “happy to help out” with such an effort.
Musk was formally announced as the leader of DOGE in November after Trump won the election.
Last month, the Trump administration gave federal employees from January 28 to February 6 to accept a buyout offer and leave their jobs. A spokesperson for OPM told BI on February 6 that over 40,000 workers have taken the buyout.
Representatives for the White House and DOGE did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.
