This story has been modified to include a comment to the Juneau Empire from a local NOAA employee.

Update 4:45 p.m. Monday: Elon Musk’s monthlong rampage through the federal bureaucracy met its first real test over the weekend, as some of President Donald Trump’s top loyalists flatly rejected the billionaire’s demand that their employees justify their jobs or be summarily fired.

By Monday, just 48 hours after an email from Musk with the subject line “What did you do last week?” landed in the email boxes of millions of federal workers, personnel officials proclaimed the “request” to be voluntary. Several agencies quickly sent out emails telling their employees they did not need to provide the five bullet points about their activity that Musk wanted.

At virtually the same time, Trump weighed in during a visit with French President Emmanuel Macron, praising Musk’s demand as “genius” and saying that employees who did not respond would be “semi-fired” or “fired.”

Many federal workers were left confused by the flip-flopping, but for the first time since the beginning of Trump’s return to power, government employees appeared to fend off — at least for now — an ambush in the war between the world’s richest man and the federal workforce.

Until this weekend, Trump’s most senior officials had uniformly embraced Musk’s call for a smaller, more efficient government, free of what Republicans call “woke” ideology. Thousands of employees have been fired or put on leave. Entire agencies, like the U.S. Agency for International Development, have been all but shuttered. Remote workers have been told to return to the office or be fired.

But the response to the weekend email suggests that there may in fact be limits to how far Musk, acting on Trump’s behalf as the leader of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, can push the bureaucracy.

The whiplash over the directives left many of the country’s 2.3 million federal workers unsure exactly what they should do — even after Monday’s reassurance from the Office of Personnel Management.

Even as televisions played Trump’s comments lauding Musk, his personnel department informed agencies that responding to the Musk email was now “voluntary” and that failing to respond would not be considered a resignation, as Musk had indicated.

Original story, 6:20 p.m. Saturday: Elon Musk threw federal workers into further confusion and alarm Saturday when he ordered them to summarize their accomplishments for the week, warning that a failure to do so would be taken as a resignation.

Shortly after Musk’s demand, which he posted on his social platform X, civil servants across the government received an email from the Office of Personnel Management with the subject line, “What did you do last week?”

The missive simultaneously hit inboxes across multiple agencies, rattling workers who had been rocked by layoffs in recent weeks and were unsure about whether to respond to Musk’s demand. His mounting pressure on the federal workforce came at the encouragement of President Donald Trump, who has been trumpeting how the billionaire has upended the bureaucracy and Saturday urged him to be even “more aggressive.”

In his post on X, Musk said employees who failed to answer the message would lose their jobs. However, that threat was not stated in the email itself.

“Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished this week and cc your manager,” said the Office of Personnel Management message that went out to federal employees Saturday afternoon. The email told employees to respond by midnight Monday.

An anonymous employee for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Juneau told the Juneau Empire employees received an email on Saturday asking them to describe their accomplishments last week. He said NOAA leadership told employees to wait for further guidance as they investigate the authenticity of the email. It was recommended not to respond or delete it.

“This is getting ridiculous,” he said. “It’s honestly infuriating, it’s embarrassing, there’s no empathy. We’re just being treated like this resource that we can just be abused and not say anything.”

Musk’s email was received by workers across the government, including at the State Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Office of Personnel Management, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, according to copies seen by The New York Times.

Some agency leaders welcomed Musk’s move. “DOGE and Elon are doing great work! Historic. We are happy to participate,” Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., whom Trump has nominated to run the office on a permanent basis, wrote in a message to his staff.

Rank-and-file workers reacted differently. One staff member at the National Institutes of Health, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation, said she was shocked by the message, which she said left her with a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. When she found out more of the context, she said, she messaged a colleague: “They’re terrorizing us.”

In response to Musk’s demand, the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal employee union, said it would challenge any “unlawful” terminations.

“Once again, Elon Musk and the Trump administration have shown their utter disdain for federal employees and the critical services they provide to the American people,” Everett Kelley, the union’s president, said in a statement.

“It is cruel and disrespectful,” he said, “to hundreds of thousands of veterans who are wearing their second uniform in the civil service to be forced to justify their job duties to this out-of-touch, privileged, unelected billionaire who has never performed one single hour of honest public service in his life.”

The message was likely to face legal challenges, experts said.

“There is zero basis in the civil service system for this,” said Sam Bagenstos, a law professor at the University of Michigan and a former general counsel to the Office of Management and Budget. “This is obviously designed to intimidate employees. Musk and DOGE and the Trump administration are persistently acting in a way that disregards civil service rules and they are just counting on the courts not being able to catch up and clean up after them.

“They are counting on employees saying, ‘This is too much, I can’t keep doing this,’” he added.

The message questioning workers’ output repeated a tactic Musk used to cull the workforce at his social media company. He has repeatedly drawn inspiration from his 2022 takeover of X, then known as Twitter, as he works to overhaul the federal government with his so-called Department of Government Efficiency. With the support of the Trump administration, Musk has ordered layoffs across the federal government and effectively shuttered several agencies.

“Elon is doing a great job, but I would like to see him be more aggressive,” Trump said in a post Saturday on Truth Social.

Musk quickly accepted the challenge. “All federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week,” Musk wrote in a social media post Saturday, saying his actions were “consistent” with the president’s demands. “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation,” he added.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the email to federal workers, and whether workers would be fired if they did not reply.

The Office of Personnel Management, which also sent Musk’s deferred resignation offer to employees, with the subject line “Fork in the Road,” last month, also sidestepped the question.

“As part of the Trump administration’s commitment to an efficient and accountable federal workforce, OPM is asking employees to provide a brief summary of what they did last week by the end of Monday, cc’ing their manager,” McLaurine Pinover, a spokesperson for the agency, said in a statement Saturday. “Agencies will determine any next steps.”

The demand left many workers reeling.

Most of the CFPB’s workforce had recently been placed on leave as Musk gutted the agency, and have been instructed not to work — leaving them with no accomplishments to report, a worker there said.

Musk’s allies in government have suggested using artificial intelligence to identify budget cuts, and workers at several agencies worried their responses would be assessed by AI.

The approach echoed one Musk took with executives and employees at Twitter. In April 2022, Musk was set to join the board at the social media company, but bickered with Parag Agrawal, its CEO at the time, over his public criticism of the company. When Agrawal asked Musk not to post detrimental things about Twitter, Musk responded in a text, “What did you get done this week?” and then told Agrawal he would buy Twitter outright.

The exchange led to Musk’s $44 billion takeover of the company, which he completed in October 2022. Musk claimed he fired Agrawal immediately, although Agrawal contested the circumstances of his departure and sued Musk for withholding severance payments.

Shortly after the acquisition, Musk told employees to print out code they had written recently — an exercise intended to prove how hard they worked. When executives at the company raised privacy concerns, Musk instructed employees to shred the code they had printed.

On Saturday, Musk acknowledged the similarities. “Parag got nothing done. Parag was fired,” he wrote in an X post about the message he intended to send to federal workers.

• This article originally appeared in The New York Times.