Elon Musk says NASA staff 'face being fired' if they don't respond to six word demand

Elon Musk has warned that federal employees could be forced into 'resignation' if they don't respond to a six-word demand, and NASA workers have received particular guidance on how they should respond.

The SpaceX founder and billionaire is leading Donald Trump's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and has been tasked with cutting federal spending.

And he's most certainly been doing that, with cuts among diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) programs and foreign aid among those being axed.

DOGE itself claims its cost-cutting moves have saved the US public $55 billion in federal funds, although this figure is yet to be verified, as per ABC News.

Anyway, Elon Musk's most recent tactic came in the form of a seemingly innocuous e-mail asking employees about their week.

If ignored, though, it could see people lose their jobs, he warned.

What does the DOGE email say?

An email with the simple subject line: "What did you do last week?" should've hit federal worker's inboxes today over the weekend.

In a post shared to Twitter, one person revealed the content of the email, sent from HR.

"Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager," it read.

"Please do not send any classified information, links, or attachments. Deadline is this Monday at 11:59pmEST."

If you ask me, it looks like one of those dodgy phishing emails and I'd certainly be thinking twice about replying to it.

There's no real indication it's from DOGE, either.

Anyway, Musk took to social media on Saturday to forewarn employees.

He wrote: "Consistent with President @realDonaldTrump’s instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week.

"Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation."

According to the BBC, the email landed in people's inboxes following Trump's appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), with emails obtained by CNN also showed they were marked as highly important, with Musk's mention of resignation as a result of a non-response similarly not included.

How have NASA employees been asked to respond?

Bloomberg reports that managers at NASA’s Space Operations Mission group told employees to hold off responding to Musk until they could establish they were 'in compliance', adding that workers should 'try to continue to enjoy your weekend'.

Another email to engineers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston told them to 'PAUSE on any response to the subject email', adding they should 'not disclose proprietary or pre-decisional information to unknown recipients without a need to know'.

Yesterday (February 23), a NASA spokesperson told Bloomberg 'anticipating sending some guidance to our workforce tomorrow'.

NASA and SpaceX

Musk has sparked controversy not only by taking on the DOGE role, but because his space exploration company, SpaceX, has been awarded billions of dollars of federal funded contracts over the years by NASA.

As of February 13, Musk's company had been awarded $57,460,047 from NASA - and that's just so far this year.

The US' Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS) shows one contract, issued on January 17, was valued at $18,874,069, while a second, signed off earlier this month on February 10, came in at $38,858,978.

In fact, SpaceX is NASA's second-largest private provider, racking up contracts worth a total of $2.25 billion from the agency in the fiscal year of 2024, as per Statista.

So, the fact that NASA employees could be forced into resignation over an email Musk has been in charge of implementing, is pretty ironic.

This all comes as NASA launches its highly-anticipated PUNCH mission to examine the sun's atmosphere this week - launching on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, no less...