Move fast and break people

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When Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) employees arrived at work on a recent frigid day in Washington, DC, they found a long, snaking line outside the building where they typically breeze through security. The department’s new secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was coming to address them that day and they figured that must explain the more than hour-long wait to get into their offices. But no, they would soon learn: With the required return to office, this was just how it was going to be. “Plan and dress accordingly so you don't end up like me, standing outside in a sweater and freezing!,” one manager advised.

Since the moment Donald Trump was sworn in as President of the United States and with him elevated billionaire Elon Musk to chief decision maker, there has been a concerted effort to test the limits of what government workers can mentally handle. With the rise of Musk’s completely lawless Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), much ink has been credulously spilled about how their gutting of federal departments is in the name of efficiency. In one important way it’s true: They’ve speedrun the unraveling of civil servant morale in order to fulfill their plan of vastly shrinking the federal workforce. And that project culminated in an X post from Musk and a related email to all employees late Saturday afternoon with a simple message: Prove your worth or you’re out. 

At 2:46pm ET on Saturday, Musk posted on his social media platform:

It was clear that in the wake of the demeaning and disastrous “Fork in the Road” deferred resignation program—which early numbers shared with me indicate didn’t yield nearly as many voluntary resignations as the new regime hoped—it was time to escalate.

Naturally—and as intended—panic immediately set in. What exactly would the email request? Would there be right or wrong answers? Who would be reviewing their responses—Musk himself? Failure to respond by when? 

Just before 5pm, the email Musk referenced—distributed by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM)—began to land in federal workers’ inboxes. This was the message in its entirety:

Most notably, the email did not include Musk’s threat of implied resignation.

The sending of the 5 bullets email took panic from simmering to 5-alarm fire, with federal workers trying to quickly understand what authority OPM had over them and whether a post on X was legally binding. Not to mention it was a Saturday when most federal workers are off duty and, unlike in Silicon Valley, are not encouraged to check email from home. Because of security concerns, some workers aren’t even able to check email remotely, so they’d have to wait until Monday to even make sure they received it. Suddenly my inbox was flooded with screenshots of the 37-word message, and messages of anger and confusion.

Friday afternoon someone at The Naval Supply Systems Command let me know about an “emergency town hall” all employees had just been required to attend. The emergency? Watching an eight-minute video from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth in which he belligerently lied to them about how the media wasn’t accurately reporting the sledgehammer he and his colleagues are taking to the military. That night, the actual Department of Defense (DoD) emergency took hold: Hegseth ousted two top military leaders for no apparent reason other than one is Black and one is a woman. 

By Saturday’s OPM email, evidence was mounting that the master plan of Russell Vought, Trump’s Director of the Office and Management and Budget (OMB) and one of the chief architects of Project 2025, was in full swing. 

In a video of a 2023 speech given by Vought at a private event released by ProPublica this past October, he can be heard saying he hoped his approach to running the government would have the following impact: "We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down...We want to put them in trauma."

The 5 bullets email was the administration’s declaration of psychological warfare: Petty on its face and lacking sufficient instructions, its one and only purpose was to scare the shit out of workers already living in peril.

In many ways, it worked. Federal workers told me about colleagues who were on vacation or short-term leave who wouldn’t have access to their work email by Monday night and were having panic attacks. One worker described the email as, “harassment from someone outside our chain of command” from “people have no idea how the government works.” 

“I can’t believe they are sending this dog shit,” one remarked. Another described half their team being sick from stress and personally having to increase their treatment for a medical condition, also because of stress. 

But the pushback to Musk’s audacity was also swift. “I’m simply not going to respond,” one fed told me. “They can go to hell.”

Others quickly gathered their thoughts and sprung into action to provide guidance for their teams. “I instructed my direct reports not to answer until we get guidance from leadership,” a government worker told me. “I am concerned that they will use AI to parse the responses and, just like with [the federal] funding [freeze], will flag responses with words like ‘transition’ or ‘diverse.’” Musk hasn’t been shy about his plans to use AI to help make the trains run on time, and it was unclear how he planned to review and evaluate all of the thousands of potential responses.

Federal agencies began issuing guidance of their own Saturday, some contradicting OPM and some contradicting others within their own agency. State Department employees received a short note late Saturday that they should not reply to the 5 bullets email and that leadership would respond to the request on behalf of the department as a whole. Department of Justice (DOJ) leadership told its offices to plan to comply, while FBI Director Kash Patel (whose office falls under DOJ) instructed his staff not to respond.

By Sunday morning, after enormous pushback to and derision of the same harebrained tactic he used at X/Twitter, Musk was online polling his followers about whether they think federal employees should have to respond to his email.

For some federal workers, understanding the game is really a mental one helps steel them for the fight ahead. “The knowledge that that’s the exact intent is the only thing that keeps me this side of sane,” one told me. 

Conversely, those who’ve proven capable of withstanding the torture have been handsomely rewarded. As I reported Wednesday on Bluesky and expanded on here Thursday, Social Security Administration (SSA) Acting Direct Leland Dudek’s career was catapulted from middle manager to top of the food chain by cooperating with Musk’s team and pledging loyalty via a social media post. He’s a true believer, and Musk seized on the opportunity to elevate a person who would carry out his devastating plans, no questions asked. 

“A traumatic experience occurs when something happens too often, too fast, and/or for too long. By all accounts, many federal employees are experiencing a deeply traumatic experience,” an anonymous current federal employee with the United States Digital Corps wrote Friday. “These workers will likely carry lasting emotional and professional scars from this experience, particularly as they attempt to navigate new employment, financial insecurity, and a fractured trust in government institutions.”

And for the ones fortunate to still have their jobs just one month into this administration, the psychological toll is ongoing.

“Pentagon security line was awful today,” a DoD employee messaged me on Friday. “Worst in 3 years.” When I said I wondered if it was part of a master plan to make federal workers miserable enough to quit, they replied, “Certainly working.”