On Monday, the Trump administration’s Office of Personnel Management (OPM) clarified that responses to an email announced by Elon Musk urging federal workers to share their accompaniments over the past week are optional.

“This afternoon, OPM during a Chief Human Capital Officers Council meeting, informed agencies that employee responses to the OPM email is voluntarily. OPM also clarified that a non-response to the email does not equate to a resignation,” OPM declared in guidance shared with human resource officers at every agency, according to The Hill.

Musk, who is overseeing the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) effort under Trump, announced on Saturday that an email would be sent out to federal workers. OPM sent the email with the subject line, “What did you do last week?” It requested employees reply with a list of roughly five accomplishments and carbon-copy their managers. A deadline of Monday at 11:59 p.m. EST was given.

The original OPM email caused a bit of a stir in Washington. Some agencies, including the FBI and State Department, instructed their personnel to ignore the email, noting they have their own procedures. Democrats in Congress demanded clarity on whether a non-response would actually constitute a resignation, and some unions even took legal action.

At the White House earlier on Monday, President Donald Trump endorsed Musk’s actions, suggesting that the “What did you do last week?” email was just the latest effort by his administration’s DOGE effort to track down areas where the government is being run poorly.

“What they’re doing is they’re trying to find out who’s working for the government. Are we paying other people that aren’t working? Where is all that money going? We have found hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud so far, and we’ve just started,” Trump said, adding later, “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.’ If people don’t respond, it’s very possible that there is no such person or they’re not working.”

Trump also insisted that agencies telling their workers to ignore the email was “done in a friendly manner” and he acknowledged that “confidential things” had to be considered. “They don’t mean that in any way combatively with Elon,” Trump continued. “They’re just saying there are some people that you don’t want to really have them tell you what they’re working on last week. But other than that, I think everyone thought it was a pretty ingenious idea.”

Fox News correspondent Jacqui Heinrich reported on X that a White House official told her news outlet that “DOGE is moving fast, at the direction of POTUS, and that’s exactly the point. It’s all about efficiency, even internally.” Heinrich shared that White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement, “Everyone is working together as one unified team at the direction of President Trump. Any notion to the contrary is completely false.”