OPM ends mandated ‘five things’ email started by Musk

The Trump administration has nixed Elon Musk’s “five things” process, in which workers gave the administration bullet points summarizing their actions over the past week.

The move further reduces Musk’s impact on the administration several months after his contentious departure. Once a senior adviser to the president and the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, Musk no longer works for the administration.

The Office of Personnel Management had overseen the responses, but several agencies and other parts of the government had already phased out the mandate. “We 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,” OPM Director Scott Kupor said in a statement.

Musk’s initiative required federal workers to respond with five things they did that week, and if they didn’t respond, it would be “taken as a resignation.” The project was part of the DOGE plans that had gone into full motion in the early days of Donald Trump’s presidency.

The “five things” demand came as federal workers were offered a severance package and others were laid off altogether. While a majority of workers described the request as reasonable, the Washington Examiner previously reported that nearly 40% called it “unreasonable.”

Trump defended the emails in February, saying, “There was a lot of genius in sending it.”

“We’re trying to find out if people are working, and so we’re sending a letter to people, ‘Please tell us what you did last week,’” he told reporters. “If people don’t respond, it’s very possible that there is no such person or they’re not working.”

Musk hoped the email would purge anyone on payroll who isn’t real or may be deceased.

“What we are trying to get to the bottom of is, we think there are a number of people on the payroll who are dead, which is probably why they can’t respond — and some people who are not real people,” Musk said. “If you have a pulse and two neurons, you can reply to an email.”

MAJORITY OF WORKERS AGREE DOGE ‘5 THINGS’ EMAIL REQUEST IS ‘REASONABLE’: POLL

The tech tycoon left the White House in May, publicly decrying Trump. He said the president was in the Jeffrey Epstein files, as the pair had a falling out over federal spending in the White House federal budget bill. Musk also threatened to launch a third party, the “America Party.”

He still appears to align with Trump, defending him over a letter he allegedly sent Epstein, the late convicted sex offender, and backing Trump’s threat to federalize Washington, D.C., on Tuesday.