Hegseth directs DOD civilian workforce to report productivity via forthcoming email

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a memorandum Thursday with updated guidance directing all of the Pentagon’s civilian employees to respond to a forthcoming email by submitting five bullet points detailing their previous week’s accomplishments, per the Trump administration’s Elon Musk-influenced orders.

This internal unclassified memo, obtained by DefenseScoop and authenticated by two officials Friday, instructs the Defense Department’s hundreds of thousands of civilian employees to reply to the email — which is slated to be delivered on Monday, March 3 — within 48 hours and to “cc” their supervisors as recipients. 

Hegseth’s dispatch does not specify the exact email address that they’ll need to respond to, or who it will come from.

However, it follows the Office of Personnel Management’s governmentwide guidance released Feb. 24 with directions to respond to an email from hr@opm.gov with the subject line “What did you do last week?”

Before that OPM email hit officials’ inboxes last Saturday, Musk — a billionaire investor, military contractor and close advisor to President Donald Trump — posted on the X social media platform he owns that it would be coming. Musk wrote that “failure to respond will be taken as a resignation,” which sparked fear and confusion across the federal workforce and seemingly conflicted with OPM’s guidance once it was sent out.

Around that time, Pentagon leadership told all of its civilian personnel to hold off on sending any responses to OPM’s inquiry about their productivity.

“On or around February 22, 2025, OPM requested federal civilians to submit approximately five bullet points detailing their prior week’s accomplishments. The Department of Defense initially paused this directive over the weekend but now requires all DoD civilian employees to submit five bullets on their previous week’s achievements,” Hegseth wrote in the new memo issued Thursday.

“Submissions must exclude classified or sensitive information and will be incorporated into weekly situation reports by supervisors. Non-compliance may lead to further review,” the secretary stated.

He further noted that “employees currently without email access due to leave, shift work, temporary duty, or other valid reasons must comply within 48 hours of regaining access.”

Delivering remarks during a Cabinet meeting at the White House on Wednesday, Musk described the OPM email that was issued a few days earlier as a “pulse check review.”

“What we are trying to get to the bottom of is we think there are a number of people on the government payroll who are dead, which is probably why they can’t respond, and some people who are not real people, like they’re literally fictional individuals that … somebody is collecting paychecks on a fictional individual. So, we’re just literally trying to figure out are these people real, are they alive, and can they write an email, which I think is a reasonable expectation for … someone in the public sector,” Musk said.

The businessman, who is leading Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) efforts, didn’t provide any documentation at the time supporting those claims.

DOD’s updated instructions come as thousands of federal employees in D.C. and across the nation have been terminated as part of Trump’s ongoing campaign to address what he views as “waste” by rapidly reducing the size of the government’s workforce.