The "what did you do this week" email to federal workers.

I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.”

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Today's read: 14 minutes.

Correction.

Yesterday, we referred to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth as the secretary of State. The error was present from the first draft and somehow slipped by our whole editorial team — maybe we were just too excited to have Isaac back.

This is our 131st correction in Tangle's 290-week history and our first correction since February 11. We track corrections and place them at the top of the newsletter in an effort to maximize transparency with readers.

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Quick hits.

1. The United States, North Korea, Russia, and Belarus voted against a UN resolution designating Russia as the aggressor in the Ukraine war. The U.S. later introduced a resolution to the UN Security Council that did not blame Russia for starting the war and called for a resolution to the conflict, which passed with Russia and China’s support; five European countries abstained. (The votes)
2. President Donald Trump hosted French President Emmanuel Macron at the White House, where the two discussed efforts to end the war in Ukraine. Macron said the United States and France need to work together to determine lasting future security guarantees. (The meeting)
3. On Monday, a federal judge temporarily barred the Department of Education and Office of Personnel Management from sharing personally identifying information with members of the Department of Government Efficiency. (The ruling) Separately, a federal judge declined The Associated Press’s request for a temporary restraining order to prevent the White House from excluding its reporters from press events over its refusal to refer to the recently renamed “Gulf of America” by its new official name. (The decision)
4. Former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy formally announced his bid for governor of Ohio. (The announcement)
5. Apple said it will commit $500 billion to U.S. manufacturing over the next four years, including opening a new facility in Houston by 2026 to support the company’s artificial intelligence system. (The commitment)

Today's topic.

Musk’s directive to federal workers. On Saturday, Elon Musk posted on X that federal employees must respond to an email from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) detailing their work in the past week, adding that “failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.” Shortly after, OPM emailed federal employees asking for a list of “5 bullets of what you accomplished last week” by Monday at 11:59pm ET (screenshot). However, many agencies have instructed their workers not to reply to the email, while unions representing federal employees filed suit to challenge the order. 

McLaurine Pinover, a spokeswoman for OPM, said the request was “part of the Trump administration’s commitment to an efficient and accountable federal workforce.” President Donald Trump also praised the initiative, calling it “genius” and saying, “If people don’t respond, it’s very possible that there is no such person or they’re not working.” 

However, on Monday, the White House appeared to soften its position, saying that employees should defer to their agency heads for guidance on how to respond to the email. Also on Monday, Elon Musk posted on X that “at the discretion of the president” federal workers will be given another chance to respond before facing termination. The Department of Health and Human Services issued competing instructions to employees, with department head Robert F. Kennedy Jr. telling workers to comply with the email after the agency’s acting general counsel instructed some not to. 

Many other agencies and departments — including the Justice Department, Federal Bureau of Investigation, State Department, the Department of Defense, the National Security Agency, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — told employees not to respond. Others, however, instructed workers to reply to the email, and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy posted his five actions on X. 

Musk’s directive follows a series of efforts by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and OPM to reduce the size of the federal workforce. Notably, OPM offered full pay and benefits through September to workers who agree to resign by February 6 (approximately 65,000 employees accepted the offer). Separately, the Trump administration is attempting to lay off thousands of probationary employees. 

On Sunday, unions challenging the probationary employee layoffs added a claim to their existing  lawsuit that the email did not follow any existing requirement for these employees to report to OPM. The unions are seeking a court order barring any action against a federal employee who does not comply with the email.

Today, we’ll share arguments from the left and right about Musk and OPM’s request, followed by my take.

What the left is saying.

• The left argues the move is the latest misguided attempt by Musk to slash the federal workforce.
• Some highlight the contradiction that Musk is acting while the White House claims he has no authority.
• Others say firing workers based on their response to the email would be illegal.

In Just Security, Nicholas Bednar wrote about “what just happened” with the Musk-OPM email.

“The OPM email does not specify how the agency intends to use the information it collects from employees… More broadly, the email raises concerns about the efficacy of the Trump administration’s efforts to cut the federal workforce,” Bednar said. “Five bullet points describing one work week—a week that included a federal holiday—cannot capture the importance of the work performed by most federal employees. And it certainly cannot capture the functions of those federal employees already placed on administrative leave, who were explicitly prohibited from performing their job duties during the week in question.”

“In essence, it appears that the Trump administration is demanding that employees justify their positions. But to date, the administration has done a consistently poor job of determining which positions are, in fact, important,” Bednar wrote. “Its poor-track record is evidenced by agencies’ efforts to recall fired probationary employees after realizing they perform crucial functions, such as managing the nuclear stockpile and the power grid or those working on responses to bird flu. Meaningful reorganization of the federal workforce requires more than five bullet points; it requires a holistic evaluation of how federal programs operate.”

In The Washington Post, Aaron Blake said “Elon Musk’s threat to federal employees is the latest episode to call into question the White House’s downplaying of his authority.”

“The email, which even some Republicans have criticized as ham-handed or cruel, gave the workers a deadline of Monday night to respond… But what has happened since then has been somewhat remarkable: Leaders at several agencies — including Trump’s own political appointees — have instructed employees not to respond to the email or to hold off on responding,” Blake wrote. “It’s perhaps the first big example of would-be allies publicly resisting Musk’s influence. Musk’s tactics have been rubbing some Trump advisers the wrong way, as The Post reported Friday, but the tensions hadn’t really broken out into the open.”

“Beyond that is how it all squares with the White House’s claims about Musk’s role. Just five days before the fiasco, after all, the White House had claimed Musk had no formal or actual authority. Then he basically threatened to end the employment of large numbers of federal workers if those employees didn’t do what he told them,” Blake said. “In other words, it’s an unclear mess. And it’s one the White House and the Trump administration surely aren’t done being made to account for, both in courts of law and in the court of public opinion — where Musk is increasingly a problem for them.”

In Slate, Scott Pilutik explored “the true purpose of Elon Musk’s weekend email ultimatum.”

“It’s unclear why Musk’s ‘Nonresponse equals resignation’ threat doesn’t also appear in the email, but one might plausibly speculate that an attorney intervened, given the Merit Systems Protection Board’s unequivocal finding that a federal worker’s resignation must be ‘affirmative’ and ‘voluntary,’ as a matter of ‘fundamental fairness and due process,’” Pilutik wrote. “Federal agencies are already required, per 5 USC Section 4302, to establish appraisal systems to rate employees’ performance. The agencies are constrained to use ‘objective’ standards and criteria appropriate to the particular employee being evaluated. The email from hr@opm.gov exists entirely outside this framework, starting with the fact that the OPM isn’t an agency.”

“A minor irony to Musk’s dead-workers-collecting-paychecks claim is that Musk himself is apparently a legal ghost, heading, but not really heading, DOGE, a quasi-legal entity that is presently enjoying all the authority of a congressionally created federal agency without any of the reporting and transparency obligations,” Pilutik said. “For Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget and the architect of Project 2025, the primary motivating factor behind his proposal to make it easier to fire federal workers is clearly malice… For Musk, a relative newcomer to far-right politics, it seems to be more about domination and the lulz.”

What the right is saying.

• The right is mixed on the directive, though some say the episode could benefit DOGE in the long run by clarifying the limits of Musk’s authority.
• Many defend Musk and say the reaction from federal workers has been overblown.
• Others suggest the request creates its own inefficiencies.

In National Review, Andrew C. McCarthy called it a “farcical episode” but said the pushback to Musk “could help DOGE in court.”

“I’m not sure DOGE is much more than a public relations stunt. It is titillating the Trump base by sending all the right Democrats and government employee unions into a tizzy,” McCarthy wrote. “Still, a sudden court ruling that Musk is wielding power unconstitutionally would stop the murky operation in its tracks. It probably helps DOGE, then, that the officials with unquestioned executive authority are treating Musk as though he’s just making suggestions — even if that may irk the president.”

“Obviously, it is not a bad idea for the Trump administration to scrutinize the federal workforce… But that’s why federal agencies have layers of supervision,” McCarthy said. “I suspect this is mostly theater. By the time you read this, in the dog years that are news days in the Trump era, the episode will no doubt have been overrun by five or ten new ‘constitutional crises.’ But by countermanding Musk, Trump officials have probably helped him show that he’s mainly a consultant, not a major government officer for appointments clause purposes.”

In Townhall, Jeff Charles said “federal workers' freakout over Elon Musk's email reaches new heights.”

“I don’t really see a problem with this request. But I can understand those arguing that it’s a bit ham-fisted. As Rep. John Curtis (R-UT) said during an interview, ‘If I could say one thing to Elon Musk, it’s like “Please put a dose of compassion in this”’ and that ‘It’s a false narrative to say we have to cut and you have to be cruel to do it as well,’” Charles wrote. “Threatening someone’s job over an email might not be the most effective leadership strategy if Musk and his team want to get people on board with his initiative. Moreover, this should probably be left to the heads of federal agencies to determine how best to ascertain what their workers are accomplishing.

“It is also worth noting that there is no way DOGE will be able to comb through the tens of thousands of emails sent by federal employees. However, the notion that such a move would require a lawsuit also seems silly. Yes, the approach was harsh, but how difficult is it to send a quick email listing five things one accomplished over the past seven days? This is one of several lawsuits folks on the left have filed to stymie the DOGE agenda, so it seems likely that this is motivated more by politics than fairness.”

In The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf wrote about “the obvious inefficiency of Elon Musk’s new order.”

“On Saturday, Elon Musk, the billionaire charged by President Donald Trump with cutting government waste, alerted the public to a massive inefficiency in the federal bureaucracy: Government employees would soon be distracted from their actual work by a request from on high,” Friedersdorf said. “As someone who hates government waste, I sympathize with any Americans who are cheering this initiative because they believe it will expose workers who accomplish nothing. But those Americans are cheering, albeit unwittingly, for massive inefficiency—just the latest example of the chaos DOGE has created across the federal government, undercutting its own aims.”

“Consider America’s roughly 14,000 Federal Aviation Administration air-traffic controllers. If each of them spends just 10 minutes opening their work email, finding this request, drafting a response, proofreading it, and sending it off, that adds up to 2,333 hours of work. Can you think of a more cartoonish example of government waste than using 292 workdays’ worth of man-hours to clarify that, last week, air-traffic controllers monitored airplanes,” Friedersdorf wrote. “Watching Musk, a man recently focused on electric cars and getting humanity to Mars, direct his inventiveness toward the public-sector equivalent of TPS reports is vexing. Improving federal efficiency is a worthy project. Trump will have no incentive to deliver on it if his base credulously cheers gambits as wasteful and poorly defended as this one.”

My take.

Reminder: "My take" is a section where I give myself space to share my own personal opinion. If you have feedback, criticism or compliments, don't unsubscribe. Write in by replying to this email, or leave a comment.

• The fact that this demeaning and counterproductive email is controversial is a total repudiation of our politics.
• No one would receive this email without being offended, and it’s going to be more costly than it is helpful.
• Musk is acting out of transparent self interest, and many Republicans are starting to lose patience.

Most days, I can see the merit in arguments from across the political spectrum. After all, the issues we cover are usually divisive and rife with nuance, historical debate, and ideological differences. But every once in a while, I’m left surprised by how silly our politics are — like when an idea as unhelpful and counterproductive as this email becomes at all controversial. 

Let me start here: No self-respecting person would take an email (preceded by an explicit threat of losing their job) demanding they list five things they did in the last week as a fair way to be treated. Every single person reading this would be somewhere between annoyed and enraged — and rightfully so. Imagine your reaction to getting this on a Saturday night, with a 48-hour deadline to answer, and at the behest of a person you’d never met, don’t work for, and who was gleefully mocking you on social media while issuing it.

Of course, nothing illustrates the self-defeating and inefficient nature of this directive more than Trump’s own agency heads instructing their employees to ignore the email. Kash Patel, the newly appointed head of the FBI, told employees not to respond to it, saying “The FBI, through the Office of the Director, is in charge of all of our review processes, and will conduct reviews in accordance with FBI procedures.” 

Which, you know… obviously.

It should not be surprising that agency heads are drawing a line with Musk here. Employee evaluations and firing decisions should not be made by a group of government neophytes (DOGE) scouring two to three million emails then using artificial intelligence to try to understand an agency they’ve never stepped foot inside.

Musk’s supporters responded to the indignation from employees by saying that this happens in the private industry, and government workers should get fired if they can’t play ball. This, too, is preposterous. I’ve never heard of a boss (aside from Musk) giving all their employees a shot clock to detail five things they’d done in the last week (regardless of whether they are on assignment or leave) under threat of termination. At minimum they would torch their reputation in whatever industry they worked in, and at worst be staring down a lawsuit and the end of their own career. 

More personally, I’m the founder and CEO of a media business — I would never treat my employees like this, because on top of being an inefficient waste of their time, it’s also incredibly disrespectful and cruel. It would make me a crappy boss, make Tangle a crappy organization to work for, and our product would suffer for it.

Some pundits on the left have tried to attack Musk by valorizing federal workers, like Just Security’s Nicholas Bednar (under “What the left is saying”), who argued, “Five bullet points describing one work week—a week that included a federal holiday—cannot capture the importance of the work performed by most federal employees.” This is an unnecessary claim, and probably untrue of many federal employees. The point isn’t that most federal workers’ jobs are so important and complex they can’t summarize their week in five bullet points — the point is that it’s ridiculous to demand millions of people to respond to a faceless email account to keep their jobs, while the person behind the plan bangs on across social media about what horrible, lazy, inefficient people they are.

Interestingly, liberals and anti-Trumpers aren’t the only ones making these arguments now; some conservatives have started standing up for the federal workforce. Chuck Ross, a pro-Trump columnist and writer, made the same points I did about how no self-respecting person would respond to this request. Conservative pundit Rick Moran argued “neither Musk nor Trump has the authority to request such a list or make continued employment in the federal government contingent on replying.” And David Marcus, one of the most reliably pro-Trump voices at Fox News, wrote that federal workers aren’t “billionaires or grifters,” adding that “the federal government’s problem is not allegedly lazy, middle class government employees, it’s corrupt wealthy politicians and their donors.”

Now those are some good arguments. 

Musk, naturally, has begun to change his explanation for this exercise. It’s no longer about only keeping the most important employees or figuring out what federal employees are actually up to, but now purportedly a plot to discover federal workers who don’t exist. “Non-existent people or the identities of dead people are being used to collect paychecks,” Musk posted. “In other words, there is outright fraud.”

Even if this underlying premise were true, why send an email to two million people to figure it out? I presume there are much better, more efficient ways to figure out which federal employees are dead and still getting paid or, alternatively, entirely made up people. More importantly, I don’t think the premise is true. Some examples exist of the government wasting millions of dollars on “ghost” employees — like police and military in Afghanistan — but we already have oversight to catch that sort of thing. I suspect Musk’s assertion will go the same way as the claim that “billions of dollars” are being sent to 150-year-old people on Social Security, which Trump’s own Social Security Administrator recently clarified was wrong (though Trump continues to repeat it).

All of this leaves me dumbfounded. Musk is not an idiot. He’s not incompetent. Anyone pretending so is deluding themselves. So what’s he up to? My best guess is he is trying to force more people out — or look for an excuse for mass layoffs — since fewer employees took the “fork in the road” buyout offer than he apparently expected. As I said last week, Musk stands to benefit personally in a dozen different ways from a beleaguered, downsized federal workforce, which has always been what DOGE is really about. 

He is too competent to truly believe he’s making the government more efficient right now. The Wall Street Journal officially estimated that DOGE will save the government roughly $2.6 billion over the next year; what are the odds that after all the future settlements, the rehiring of workers, the increased cost of hiring workers who feel these jobs are not secure and the eight months of severance we’re paying to 75,000 people who took the buyout offer, that this all ends up costing us money? 

I honestly don’t know how long all of this will go on. Republicans in Congress are privately starting to worry, and who can blame them? ABC estimates these layoffs are impacting some 200,000 people. I suspect that means tens of millions of Americans now know someone who has lost their job due to these cuts. Some of them will have their lives ruined — they’ll lose homes, or get divorced, or have to scramble to find health insurance for their sick spouse. I know of one woman who was five months pregnant, working in the National Parks, and had to leave her temporary housing (provided by her job) to go apartment hunting — now unemployed in a rural area with limited opportunities and sparse housing. She was fired without cause or explanation as part of the DOGE cuts.

People are going to be pissed. Social media is replete with Trump voters asking why they or their family members lost their jobs. And those people are going to start demanding more responsibility from Congress. Eventually, Republicans and Democrats will have to do their jobs and control how these agencies are being run, how this money is being spent, and who gets to keep their jobs.

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Your questions, answered.

Q: Was what Steve Bannon did at CPAC a Nazi salute, or will you explain that one away, too?

— Trent from Oklahoma City, OK

Ari Weitzman, Managing Editor: Yes, it was a Nazi salute. In January, I wrote that I didn’t think Elon Musk gave an intentional Nazi salute. I’ve gotten a lot of pushback for that interpretation that I don’t want to relitigate, but if you’re curious to hear more you can listen to my thought process in more detail on our podcast. Bannon’s gesture, however, looked very different, and it can’t be reasonably explained away by any other motive. He wasn’t throwing his heart out to the audience. He wasn’t waving to someone. He can’t claim to be socially awkward. Bannon yelled “Fight! Fight! Fight!!” then paused, turned, and raised his right arm. He then paused again and said, “Amen!”

I don’t see anything else Bannon could have been doing. I think his “sieg heil” gesture was meant to troll people who were bothered by what Elon Musk did; but even if that’s the case, that means Bannon was taunting people who thought Musk gave an intentional Nazi salute by… giving an intentional Nazi salute.

People can say or do something bad or hurtful accidentally, and I’m pretty tolerant about that, especially if they respond with humility. Musk’s response was notably poor, which rightfully eroded a lot of grace he might otherwise be granted. Bannon made a Nazi salute in a way that didn’t seem accidental, and so far his response hasn’t been any better. Perhaps worst of all is that no Republicans or CPAC attendee has publicly condemned the moment; the only pushback has come from a far-right French politician. This mainstreaming of Nazi salutes, even sarcastically, is an enormous problem for the right — it isn’t a leftist hallucination, and still images of Democrats mid-wave don’t cancel out the problem. For the health of the party, it’s a rot that they have to address now.

Want to have a question answered in the newsletter? You can reply to this email (it goes straight to our inbox) or fill out this form.

Under the radar.

Home prices in the United States increased on an annual basis for the 19th consecutive month in January, while sales of previously occupied homes fell 4.9% from December. Economists point to mortgage rates as a primary driver of the trend, as 30-year mortgage rates have risen to roughly 7% in 2025 after falling to a two-year low last September. “Mortgage rates have refused to budge for several months despite multiple rounds of short-term interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve,” Lawrence Yun, chief economist at the National Association of Realtors, said. “When combined with elevated home prices, housing affordability remains a major challenge.” The Associated Press has the story.

Numbers.

• 1.5 million. The approximate number of federal workers who are in the “competitive service,” meaning they cannot be fired, suspended, demoted, or subjected to other “adverse actions” without cause after they pass a probationary period, according to Pew Research.
• 735,000. The approximate number of federal workers who are in the “excepted service,” meaning their jobs are exempted from the regular hiring rules (examples include lawyers, teachers, and chaplains). 
• 8,700. The approximate number of federal workers who are in a special classification called the “Senior Executive Service” (SES) as managers of major programs and projects.
• 850. The approximate number of SES employees who can typically be fired or removed from the SES at the discretion of the head of their agency.
• 72%. The percentage of Americans who think there should be a U.S. government agency focused on efficiency initiatives, according to a February 2025 Harvard-CAPS poll.
• 60%. The percentage of Americans who think DOGE is helping make major cuts in government expenditures. 
• 34% and 49%. The percentage of U.S. adults who approve and disapprove, respectively, of Elon Musk’s job performance in the federal government, according to a February 2025 Washington Post-Ipsos poll. 
• 6% and 70%. The percentage of Democrats and Republicans, respectively, who approve of Elon Musk’s job performance in the federal government. 

The extras.

• One year ago today we had just written about Alexander Smirnov’s arrest.
• The most clicked link in yesterday’s newsletter was the OPM email to federal employees.
• Nothing to do with politics: The hardest-working cities in the U.S. 
• Yesterday’s survey: 2,666 readers answered our survey on the Pentagon firings with 69% approving of none of the dismissals. “Gutting our military is not the way to strengthen it,” one respondent said.

Have a nice day.

Finding accessible and affordable dental care can be a struggle for many families, but a community college in Massachusetts is tackling this problem. In a symbiotic clinic, dental students are given the opportunity to provide care to real patients, offering free teeth cleaning to children and discounted rates to adults. The February clinic for Children’s Dental Health Week focuses on “all things oral care,” teaching patients how nutrition impacts dental health as well as teaching them about dental procedures. CBS News has the story.

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