DOGE Makes '5-Bullets' Email A Weekly Task, Sparking fresh Turf Battle, worker Confusion

After the first attempt turned into a messy turf war with uneven compliance, the Department of Government Efficiency has doubled down, issuing a second emailed directive to millions of federal employees, instructing them to reply with five bullets describing accomplishments from the previous week. Inviting even more controversy, DOGE told employees it will now be a weekly requirement. Once again, multiple federal agencies are countermanding the DOGE demand amid questions about chains of command and the productivity toll associated with a request that has an unclear purpose.

For many employees, the second request hit in-boxes late Friday, with a subject line that read, “What did you do last week? Part II.” Much like the previous request, it told recipients to reply with “approx. 5 bullets describing what you accomplished last week and cc your manager.” However, unlike the first go-round, this one made the task a recurring one: “Going forward, please complete the above task each week by Mondays at 11:59pmET.”

Under the guidance of Elon Musk, DOGE is delivering unprecedented, long-overdue scrutiny of the bloated federal government (Chesnot/Getty via Axios)

As with the first DOGE directive, the second one prompted some parts of the federal government to tell their employees not to reply. That included the State Department, which reassured employees that “department leadership will continue to respond on the behalf of our workforce.” A message sent to Energy Department workers said, „Per the Secretary’s guidance, please do not respond, if you have not already done so,” the Washington Post reports. Taking a particularly unhelpful tack, the head of a VA hospital told employees it was up to them if they want to reply or not.

One doesn’t have to be a defender of government-as-usual to understand why a cabinet secretary or agency head– and a Trump-appointed one at that — would bristle at an outside entity giving orders to every employee in his organization. Even if it’s assumed DOGE has such authority, it would be understandably perceived by many leaders as overreach and micromanagement of employees they’re personally responsible for. Of course, the question of authority isn’t an academic one; many of the 5-bullets directives are being sent by the Office of Personnel Management, which some say lacks the power to issue such commands; the question is already being litigated.

All that aside, federal employees are confused about the ultimate aim of the requirement — which is affecting how much time they’re investing in it. Commenting on X and elsewhere, DOGE’s Elon Musk has suggested the goal is merely to ferret out „non-existent” or dead federal employees, calling it a „very basic pulse check” to confirm recipients have „a pulse and two neurons.” If genuine, that characterization raises the question of why that requires five bullets — particularly when you consider DOGE’s titular aim of government efficiency.

Critically, unlike Musk’s spoken and social-media comments, the OPM emails don’t instruct employees to treat the task casually and invest minimal time in complying. Against the backdrop of DOGE’s absolutely laudable drive to achieve a major reduction in the size of the federal workforce, and with no clear, official explanation of what purpose the bullets serve, it’s understandable that anxious federal employees, thinking their retention may swing in the balance, would invest far more time than Musk anticipates, aiming for a level of substance and quality akin to what they’d put on a resume written to save their jobs.

Apparently harboring their own worries about how the 5-bullet requirement may affect the fate of their budgets and organizations, some DOGE-compliant federal entities are reinforcing the notion that employees should strive to craft the sharpest, most compelling bullets possible, distributing detailed lists of tips for writing exemplary responses. ZeroHedge has obtained a copy of one such guidance sheet sent to at least one organization within the Department of Defense. Spanning more than a page, it urge employees to, for one example, find opportunities to list accomplishments that are in harmony with DOGE’s mission.

No more $32,000 transgender comic books for Peruvians: DOGE spearheaded the dismantling of the money-wasting US Agency for International Development (AFP via BBC)

Speaking to the Washington Post, one federal employee shared her own back-of-envelope calculation of the weekly cost of the contentious DOGE exercise:

If 2 million federal employees each spend 15 minutes answering the emails, at an average hourly wage of $35, that will equate to 500,000 hours and $17.5 million going toward responding to the messages each week. “That’s a conservative estimate,” the employee said. “There are more than 2 million feds, and most of us spent way more than 15 minutes between trying to figure out what it meant, meetings about whether to respond or not and actually writing the email.”

However noble DOGE’s intentions — and we’re demonstrably among the organization’s greatest enthusiasts — two reasonable questions hang overhead: Who (or what) is reading these millions and millions of bullets, and what exactly is the payoff for taxpayers from a now-weekly chore assigned to their 2 million employees?