Last February, the Department of Government Efficiency, guided by Elon Musk, sent a simple directive to federal workers: explain your job in five bullet points. The catch? “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”
Now, thanks to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit from activist nonprofit Citizens for Constitutional Integrity, we’re seeing how workers actually responded. About 200 emails from the Office of Personnel Management have surfaced, and they paint a picture of frustration, defiance, and bureaucratic tedium that’s hard to look away from.
Some workers used the opportunity to vent. One employee wrote bluntly: “If you do not have anything that is positive, then please do not waste my time with these emails. I am here to serve the people and not anyone else who has nothing better to do then to cause chaos.” The worker added that firing them was moot anyway since they were already retiring. That’s the kind of response that probably made whoever read it wince.
The Range of Reactions
Not everyone was hostile. Many workers simply documented their actual work, breaking down their tasks with varying levels of detail. One employee got granular, mapping out their schedule by hourly and thirty-minute increments, including lunch breaks. Another noted they checked email every five minutes. A worker in HR detailed restructuring programs and efforts to terminate the Presidential Management Fellows program.
What’s striking is the range. Some responses felt like genuine attempts to justify their existence within the system. Others felt like barely concealed middle fingers. One worker wrote: “I understand that there is a mission to accomplish and that soft skills may not always be a priority, but to what end will efforts to humiliate federal employees—including those of us who agree that change is necessary—serve?” That’s someone who accepts reform in principle but draws a line at the method.
What This Actually Represents
The 200 emails are just the tip of something much larger. Citizens for Constitutional Integrity estimates there are about 2.9 million outstanding emails from across the entire federal government in response to this directive. OPM alone had roughly 3,000 more. A judge has ordered the Office of Personnel Management to produce around 250 emails monthly, meaning we’ll likely see more of this play out over time.
Interestingly, some federal agencies pushed back almost immediately. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention paused the requirement in May 2025, saying it would continue with other forms of performance monitoring instead. The Internal Revenue Service took a similar stance, stating that supervisors would observe employee performance regularly without the email mandate. Even within the system, there was resistance.
The Aftermath Nobody Talks About
DOGE’s efforts have since wound down, and Musk stepped back from the role in April 2025. But the damage—or the restructuring, depending on your perspective—lingers. Some agencies rehired workers who were initially cut, but many remain unemployed. Others voluntarily left and never came back. According to reporting from Business Insider, former federal workers described the experience as genuinely traumatic. Rachel Brittin, who worked at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, was fired, reinstated, and then fired again. She called it “more than a career setback—it was emotionally exhausting and deeply disorienting.”
That’s the part the email directive doesn’t capture. The five-bullet-point exercise was performative, a way to justify cuts that were probably already planned. The real story isn’t in how workers answered the question. It’s in how the whole exercise reflected a particular approach to government: treat it like a business that needs ruthless optimization, measure everything, and assume inefficiency unless proven otherwise.
The irony is that some of the workers who responded, including those defending their positions passionately, might have actually been doing things worth doing. But the directive didn’t really invite nuance. It invited fear and compliance, with a side of theatrical accountability.
What does it say about an institution when its efficiency drive produces mostly resentment, with just enough legitimate grievances mixed in to make dismissing it all seem unfair?
