Federal workers sue over Elon Musk’s threat to fire them

Elon Musk (Jose Luis Magana/AP)

Lawyers for US federal workers have said in a lawsuit that billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk has violated the law with his weekend demand that employees explain their accomplishments or risk being fired.

The updated lawsuit, which was filed in federal court in California and was provided to The Associated Press, is trying to block mass layoffs pursued by Mr Musk and President Donald Trump, including any connected to the email distributed by the Office of Personnel Management on Saturday.

The office, which functions as a human resources agency for the federal government, said employees needed to detail five things that they did last week by end of day on Monday.

“No OPM rule, regulation, policy, or program has ever, in United States history, purported to require all federal workers to submit reports to OPM,” said the amended complaint, which was filed on behalf of unions, businesses veterans, and conservation groups.

Smaller government is the only way to restore your freedom https://t.co/xF09VCttN0

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 24, 2025

It called the threat of mass firings “one of the most massive employment frauds in the history of this country”.

Mr Musk, who is leading the Republican president’s efforts to overhaul and downsize the federal government, continued to threaten federal workers on Monday morning even as confusion spread through the administration and some top officials told employees not to comply.

“Those who do not take this email seriously will soon be furthering their career elsewhere,” Mr Musk posted early in the morning on X, his social media platform.

He also escalated Mr Trump’s demand for employees to stop working remotely.

Those who ignored President Trump’s executive order to return to work have now received over a month’s warning.

Starting this week, those who still fail to return to office will be placed on administrative leave. https://t.co/7XRj6W21eX

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 24, 2025

“Starting this week, those who still fail to return to office will be placed on administrative leave,” Mr Musk posted.

The latest round of turmoil began over the weekend, when Mr Trump posted on Truth Social, his social media website, that “Elon is doing a great job, but I would like to see him get more aggresive”.

Mr Musk followed up by saying “all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week”.

He claimed that “failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”

The directive echoed how the billionaire entrepreneur has managed his own companies.

The Office of Personnel Management sent out its own request afterwards.

“Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager,” the message said. However, it said nothing about the potential for employees to get fired for noncompliance.

The deadline was listed as 11.59pm EST on Monday.

There was swift resistance from several key US agencies led by the president’s loyalists — including the FBI, State Department, Homeland Security and the Pentagon — which instructed their employees over the weekend not to respond.

Lawmakers in both parties said that Mr Musk’s mandate may be illegal, while unions threatened to sue.

One message on Sunday morning from the Department of Health and Human Services, led by Robert F Kennedy Jr, instructed its roughly 80,000 employees to comply.

That was shortly after the acting general counsel, Sean Keveney, had instructed some not to.

And by Sunday evening, agency leadership issued new instructions that employees should “pause activities” related to the request until noon on Monday.

“I’ll be candid with you. Having put in over 70 hours of work last week advancing Administration’s priorities, I was personally insulted to receive the below email,” Mr Keveney said in an email viewed by The Associated Press that acknowledged a broad sense of “uncertainty and stress” within the agency.

Mr Keveney laid out security concerns and pointed out some of the work done by the agency’s employees may be protected by attorney-client privilege: “I have received no assurances that there are appropriate protections in place to safeguard responses to this email.”