US federal employees sue Musk for threatening to fire them if they don't justify what they do

US federal officials on Monday accused billionaire Elon Musk, an adviser to US President Donald Trump, of violating the law by threatening to fire them if they did not explain what they were doing.

The updated lawsuit, which was filed in California federal court by attorneys for federal employees, seeks to block the mass layoffs sought by Musk and Trump, including any related to the email distributed to employees by the Office of Personnel Management on Saturday.

The office, which functions as a human resources agency for the US federal government, said in the email that employees had to list five things they had done in the past week by the end of today.

"No rule, regulation, policy or program of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has ever, in the history of the United States, required all federal employees to file reports with OPM," reads the complaint filed on behalf of unions, business owners and advocacy organizations represented by the State Democracy Defenders Fund (SDDF), and cited by the US news agency, The Associated Press (AP).

The SDDF called the threat of mass layoffs "one of the most gigantic employment frauds in the country's history."

Musk, who is leading the Republican president's efforts to reform and reduce the size of the federal government, continued to threaten federal workers this morning, even after confusion spread through the administration and some top officials told employees not to obey the order.

"Those who fail to take this email seriously will soon be continuing their careers elsewhere," Musk wrote on his social network X (formerly Twitter).

He also took Trump's demand that federal employees stop working remotely and took it further, stating that "starting this week, those who continue to not return to the office will be placed on administrative leave."

The latest round of turmoil began over the weekend, when Trump posted on his social media platform, Truth Social: "ELON IS DOING A GREAT JOB, BUT I WOULD LIKE TO SEE HIM MORE AGGRESSIVE."

Musk took the opportunity to announce that "all federal employees will soon receive an email asking them to explain what they did last week. Failure to respond will be considered termination," a directive similar to how the billionaire entrepreneur has managed his own companies.

The Personnel Management Office then sent its own request.

"Please reply to this email with about five points about what you did last week and cc your manager," the message read.

Thousands of government employees have already been forced out of the federal workforce -- either simply laid off or through a proposed "deferred severance" -- during the first month of Trump's second presidential term (2025-2029).

There is no official number available for the total number of layoffs so far, but the AP has counted hundreds of thousands of workers who are being affected, many of whom work outside Washington.

On Sunday, Musk described his request as "a very simple pulse check."

"The reason this is important is that a significant number of people who should be working for the government are doing so little work that they don't even check their email!" Musk wrote on the social network X.

"In some cases, we believe that non-existent people or the identities of dead people are being used to collect paychecks. In other words, there is definitely fraud," he said, although he did not provide any evidence of such fraud.

Meanwhile, thousands of other civil servants are preparing to leave federal work next week, including civilian workers on internships at the Pentagon and nearly all employees at the Agency for International Development, through cuts or furloughs.