It was the email that launched a thousand panic attacks.
In early 2025, millions of federal workers woke up to a message that felt like a digital pink slip. The premise was simple: "Tell us five things you did last week." The catch? If you didn’t hit reply, you were basically quitting. Or so Elon Musk said.
Fast forward to today, and that whole "DOGE email" saga has been tossed into the recycling bin of history. The Trump administration officially pulled the plug on the initiative, ending one of the most chaotic experiments in government "efficiency" we've seen in decades.
But why did it fail? And how did a project personally championed by the world's richest man and the President of the United States end up getting quietly buried by the very administration that birthed it?
The 48-Hour Ultimatum that Shook D.C.
Let’s go back to February 2025. Elon Musk, fresh into his role leading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), decided to apply his "hardcore" Twitter management style to the entire U.S. federal workforce. He didn't just want reports; he wanted proof of life.
The email, sent via the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), was short. It asked for approximately five bullet points of accomplishments. Musk took to X (formerly Twitter) to clarify the stakes: "Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation."
Talk about a vibe shift for the civil service.
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Honestly, the chaos was immediate. You had air traffic controllers, VA surgeons, and nuclear scientists suddenly wondering if they needed to stop saving lives to write a "What I Did on My Summer Vacation" style summary for a billionaire in Mar-a-Lago.
Turf Wars and the "Kash Patel" Factor
You'd think the administration would be a united front on this, right? Wrong.
Almost immediately, the "infighting" started. While Trump was publicly calling the email "ingenious," his own Cabinet heads were essentially telling their employees to hit the ignore button.
- The FBI: Director Kash Patel—hardly a "Deep State" liberal—told his staff to "pause" any response. He argued the FBI had its own review processes and didn't need DOGE looking over their shoulders.
- The Pentagon: The Department of Defense issued a letter asserting its autonomy. They basically said, "We'll handle our own performance reviews, thanks."
- State Department: Officials there told staff they weren't obligated to report outside their chain of command.
It turns out, even in a Trump-aligned government, people really hate it when a "consultant" tries to take over their department. The initiative wasn't just facing resistance from unions; it was facing a full-blown mutiny from the people Trump actually hired to run the country.
Why the Trump Administration Finally Killed It
By August 2025, the "Five Things" email was officially dead. Scott Kupor, the OPM Director, issued a memo that felt like a polite way of saying, "This was a huge waste of time."
The administration’s reasoning was pretty straightforward: managers are already supposed to know what their teams are doing. Adding a weekly mass email to 2 million people didn't create efficiency; it created a data mountain that no one was actually reading.
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The OPM eventually admitted they didn't even have a plan for what to do with the information. Imagine millions of emails hitting a server with no one on the other end to grade them. It's the definition of the "bureaucracy" Musk said he wanted to destroy.
The Legal Reality Check
Beyond the internal drama, there was the small problem of the law.
Federal employment law is a beast. You can't just declare a non-response to an email as a "resignation." The Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) has decades of case law saying resignations have to be voluntary and informed. Musk’s "reply or you’re fired" tactic was a legal house of cards that was already being shredded in the courts by the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE).
The "Quiet Quitting" of DOGE
The termination of the email initiative was the first real sign that Musk’s influence in the White House was starting to wane.
By the time the program was scrapped, reports were swirling about a "messy public feud" between Musk and Trump. Musk had reportedly started attacking a Republican debt-ceiling bill, and Trump’s team responded by "quiet-quitting" DOGE. They started appointing regular GSA officials to roles Musk's team used to hold, effectively watering down his power.
By November 2025, DOGE as a standalone "department" had basically ceased to exist, getting folded into existing structures or just... disappearing.
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Lessons for the Future of Government
So, what did we actually learn from this?
First, the "Silicon Valley" approach of "move fast and break things" doesn't work well when "the things" are the Social Security Administration or the power grid. When you break government, people don't just lose an app; they lose their pensions or their safety.
Second, accountability is great, but it has to be meaningful. A weekly bulleted list isn't accountability; it's performative productivity.
What you should take away from this:
- Direct reporting lines matter: If you're a manager (in government or business), don't rely on automated "check-ins" to replace actual leadership.
- Know the labor laws: Whether it's the federal government or a 10-person startup, you can't just invent new ways to fire people on a Saturday night.
- Watch the "Shadow Government": The rise and fall of DOGE shows that outside advisors often struggle when they hit the "iron triangle" of D.C. bureaucracy.
The federal workforce is still there. The emails have stopped. And for now, the "chainsaw" has been put back in the shed.
If you're a federal employee or just someone interested in how your tax dollars are managed, the best next step is to look into the OPM's revised performance management guidelines for 2026. They've moved back to traditional, agency-specific reviews that—honestly—actually hold people accountable without the Twitter-style drama.