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Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard instructed intelligence community officers not to respond to Elon Musk’s email requesting information about five things they did last week, citing concerns over the sensitivity and classified nature of intelligence jobs.
Gabbard, a recent ally of President Donald Trump, directed intelligence staffers to do so just hours after hundreds of thousands of federal workers received an ultimatum email from Musk asking them to list five things they accomplished last week or risk losing their jobs.
“Given the inherently sensitive and classified nature of our work, [intelligence community] employees should not respond to the [Office of Personnel Management] email,” Gabbard wrote, according to the New York Times.
The email warned federal workers that failure to list five things they did in bullet-point format by Monday evening would be taken as a form of resignation. Musk utilized a similar tactic to Twitter employees when he took over the social media platform in 2023.
Although it asked employees not to include any classified information in their responses, some officials feared that even declassified information about projects could hurt U.S. national security if the emails were obtained by an adversary.
Per federal law, certain employees cannot disclose information about their work to third parties.
Gabbard joined other leaders of national security-adjacent departments and agencies in asking employees to ignore the email.
FBI Director Kash Patel, a Trump loyalist, also asked employees to ignore the email, saying only the department had the authority to review processes. The Department of Defense sent a similar message to its employees on Sunday afternoon as well.
State Department official Tibor Nagy also asked employees not to respond to Musk’s request, saying the department would issue a response on their behalf.
“No employee is obligated to report their activities outside of their Department chain of command,” Nagy wrote in an email, obtained by the Times.
Outside of potential national security implications, Musk’s threat raised alarm bells about its legality from current and former lawmakers on both sides of the aisle as well as union leaders.
Mike Lawler, a Republican Representative from New York, said he was unsure how “necessarily feasible” it was to request such information.
“Obviously, a lot of federal employees are under union contract,” Lawyer said to ABC’s This Week on Sunday.
The unorthodox request from the Office of Personnel Management, which has reportedly been taken over by the Department of Government Efficiency employees, led to confusion in the government as some feared the email was a form of phishing.
The acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency had asked employees to reply to the “valid request” – despite mixed messages from other leaders in the Department of Defense.
Certain officials within the Department of Health and Human Services directed staff to reply to the email but supervisors at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, an agency under HHS, asked employees not to respond, according to the Washington Post.
Other departments were unsure how to respond due to the conflicting orders. Employees within the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau received the email but most staff had been ordered to stop working as Trump’s administration seeks to get rid of the watchdog agency.
