Transcript of Elon Musk emails causing whiplash and chaos for federal workers

Whiplash seems to be the word of the day, especially when it comes to federal workers. First, they got a midnight deadline to essentially justify their jobs via email or lose them if they didn't reply. Then, after days of confusion, even among some cabinet secretaries, suddenly, replying became voluntary, and their jobs were also no longer at stake. But tonight, we are hearing from Elon Musk, who says it is back and that another email could soon be on the way to them. Now, this all started when he first issued an ultimatum over the weekend. It came via the Office of Personnel Management in an email titled, What Did You Do Last Week? It contained an order to list at least five accomplishments, as you can see here, and federal workers were given a deadline of 11: 59 PM Eastern tonight to respond. What followed was disbelief, a lot of confusion, some frustration, not just from these employees who got the email, even their bosses seemed unsure about what they should do. Multiple federal agencies, including the Pentagon, the FBI, the State Department told their employees just to ignore the ultimatum. They didn't have to respond. Then today, around 1: 00 this afternoon, we learned where President Trump stood on all of this, 100% behind Elon Musk.

I thought it was great because we have people that don't show up to work, and nobody even knows if they work for the government. So by asking the question, Tell us what you did this week, what he's doing is saying, Are you actually working? And then if you don't answer, like you're semi-fired or you're fired because a lot of people are not answering because they don't even exist. I think it was actually there was a lot of genius in sending it.

The President praising it as he also downplayed any notion this idea of a disconnect between what Musk was telling federal employees to do and what they were hearing from agency heads.

No, no, no. That was done in a friendly manner. Only things such as perhaps Marco at State Department, where they have very confidential things or the FBI, where they're working on confidential things. They don't mean that in any way combatively with Elon. 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.

That's what we heard from the President today around lunch inside the oval office. It was around then, early this afternoon, when we also heard from Trump's own government that clarified that email was optional, potentially because of the national security concerns that you heard the President cite there that got in the way. Look at what the Department of Health and Human Services warned to its employees, saying if they did respond, again, given this was voluntary, that they should, quote, assume that what you write will be read by maligned foreign actors and tailor your response accordingly. Then tonight, we heard from Musk on social media who said this, subject to the discretion of the President, they will be given another chance. Failure to respond a second time will result in termination.