The Trump administration’s human resources department is no longer forcing federal workers to respond to a weekly email asking them to list five recent accomplishments, an initiative that was the brainchild of Elon Musk before his dramatic falling out with the president earlier this year.
Instead, the Office of Personnel Management decided its internal performance evaluations had been sufficient all along.
“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 to Reuters, which first reported the program’s conclusion.
The formal recension of the mandate, which OPM officials delivered to agency HR heads via a memo, followed months of backsliding from some agencies on enforcing the mandatory email policy. At the time it was implemented, Musk warned that not responding would count as a resignation.
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The Department of Government Efficiency-led directive caught immediate resistance when it launched in February from some of Trump’s Cabinet heads, who instructed employees not to comply.
That didn’t stop Trump from praising the DOGE program when asked earlier this year about the email.
“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,’” Trump told reporters. “I thought it was great, because we have people that don’t show up to work and nobody even knows if they work for the government.”
Its abolishment is more evidence of Musk’s imprint on the White House dwindling in his absence, and follows Trump officials already quiet-quitting DOGE last week by appointing more officials at the General Services Administration, effectively watering down the influence of the few Musk-friendly affiliates that remained at the agency.
The rollbacks came just over six months after Trump gave the Republican megadonor free reign to slash the federal government, a project that ultimately resulted in no net federal cost savings.
DOGE regularly overstated the savings it made. Recent estimates suggest Musk’s drastic efforts actually ended up costing billions more than it managed to cut, and at least 154,000 estimated federal workers are being paid not to work as part of DOGE’s deferred resignation, or “Fork in the Road,” program.
Musk initially departed the White House with fanfare, but his relationship with Trump within days devolved into a messy public feud. Musk later seemed to backtrack some of his social media posts attacking the president, saying they went “too far.”
The pair’s back-and-forth went nuclear due to Musk’s vocal opposition to a Republican megabill championed by Trump, which he pushed through a bitterly divided Congress.
Musk has threatened to fund primary challenges against Republicans who lined up behind Trump to vote for the sweeping reconciliation package, which he derided as “the biggest debt increase in history.”
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