{"id":45734,"date":"2025-08-05T14:10:00","date_gmt":"2025-08-05T19:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/?p=45734"},"modified":"2025-08-05T22:58:11","modified_gmt":"2025-08-06T03:58:11","slug":"trump-administration-ends-use-of-musk-era-5-things-email","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/?p=45734","title":{"rendered":"Trump administration ends use of Musk-era \u20185 things\u2019 email"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Trump administration has ended the practice of asking federal workers<\/u><\/a> to outline what they accomplished over the last week in five bullet points<\/u><\/a>, which was started at the direction of former special adviser<\/u><\/a> Elon Musk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) had overseen the responses, which have largely been phased out at various agencies, since February before fully nixing the idea on Tuesday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe communicated with agency HR leads that OPM was no longer going to manage the five things process nor utilize it internally. At OPM, we believe that managers are accountable to staying informed about what their team members are working on and have many other existing tools to do so,\u201d OPM Director Scott Kupor said in a statement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reuters first reported<\/u><\/a> on the new directive, which is part of the Trump administration moving past some of Musk\u2019s initiatives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Tesla CEO left his role in May and soon after had a public and feisty feud<\/u><\/a> with President Trump\u2002<\/u><\/a>over his signature \u201cbig, beautiful bill<\/u><\/a>\u201d before Congress passed it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first request for the five bullet points in February<\/u><\/a>, as part of Musk\u2019s Department of Government Efficiency overhaul of the federal government<\/u><\/a>, led to widespread confusion within agencies. Some agency heads told their workers they didn\u2019t have to reply, while some told their staff they should.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Musk at the time said failure to respond<\/u><\/a> to the email would be \u201ctaken as a resignation,\u201d which led to blowback. He then argued that by knowing what employees accomplish, the administration will be able to spot \u201coutright fraud.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

OPM then told agency leaders<\/u><\/a> that failure to respond to the email will not be considered a resignation and that workers should consider the email voluntary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In March, the agency quietly updated<\/u><\/a> a privacy impact assessment on its efforts to email all federal workers, stripping language indicating responses from the staffers were \u201cexplicitly voluntary.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The president defended the emails<\/u><\/a> earlier this year, saying \u201cthere was a lot of genius in sending it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe\u2019re trying to find out if people are working and so we\u2019re sending a letter to people, \u2018Please tell us what you did last week,’\u201d he told reporters in February. \u201cIf people don\u2019t respond, it\u2019s very possible that there is no such person or they\u2019re not working.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

thehill<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Trump administration has ended the practice of asking federal workers to outline what they accomplished over the last week in five bullet points, which was started at the direction of former special adviser Elon Musk. The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) had overseen the responses, which have largely been phased out at various agencies, since February before fully nixing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":45735,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[1490,1330,1230],"class_list":["post-45734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-administration","tag-musk","tag-trump"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45734","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=45734"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45734\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45737,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45734\/revisions\/45737"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/45735"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=45734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=45734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=45734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}