WASHINGTON: A second email asking US federal workers to justify their jobs was sent on Friday, as part of President Donald Trump’s initiative to slash spending, media outlets reported.

It came a week after Elon Musk, the billionaire appointed by Trump to downsize the government, engineered a first mass email to the federal government’s two million employees, ordering them to justify their work or risk being fired.

The message, sent from the US Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the government’s HR department, had created confusion among an already anxious workforce, as multiple federal agencies told staff to ignore it. Friday’s email once again asked staff to respond with around five bullet points describing what they accomplished in the past week and added that it would become a weekly task.

The second round of emails started going out late Friday, The New York Times, NPR and CBS News reported, stating that they had seen copies of the second message.

The email had the subject line, “What did you do last week? Part II” and went out to workers at various agencies, including the FBI, the Treasury Department and the Department of Homeland Security.

Musk, whom Trump put in charge of the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) advisory body, tasking him with slashing public spending and tackling alleged waste and corruption, has not commented on X about the new emails. Unlike with the first email, the second message also asked workers to send their list of accomplishments by the end of Monday on a weekly basis going forward.

It also said workers whose activities are classified or sensitive could simply respond with “All of my activities are sensitive.” CBS reported that this time the OPM had tasked individual agencies to send the email themselves, adding that each department could decide whether to do so.

Musk had previously said the original email “was basically a check to see if the employee had a pulse and was capable of replying to an email.” Trump in a message on his social media platform Truth Social had praised Musk for “doing a great job”, but said “I would like to see him get more aggressive.”

Published in Dawn, March 2nd, 2025