Last summer, Donald Trump gushed to Elon Musk about the billionaire’s propensity for firing people. “You’re the greatest cutter,” Trump said in a conversation with Musk on X, formerly Twitter. “I look at what you do. You walk in and say, ‘You want to quit?’ I won’t mention the name of the company but they go on strike, and you say, ‘That’s OK. You’re all gone. You’re all gone.'” As the head of Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Musk has led an unprecedented, extralegal purge of the federal government — tossing out tens of thousands of workers with little regard for their lives, service, or value to the public, while dismantling and shuttering whole agencies. On Saturday, Trump called on Musk to ramp up the bloodletting. “ELON IS DOING A GREAT JOB, BUT I WOULD LIKE TO SEE HIM GET MORE AGGRESSIVE,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “REMEMBER, WE HAVE A COUNTRY TO SAVE, BUT ULTIMATELY, TO MAKE GREATER THAN EVER BEFORE. MAGA!” “Will do, Mr. President!” Musk dutifully replied. The world’s richest man soon dusted off his playbook for firings when he took over Twitter, now rebranded as X. “Consistent with President @realDonaldTrump’s instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week,” Musk wrote. “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.” On Saturday afternoon, federal employees received a new email, a copy of which was obtained by Rolling Stone, sent by “HR” at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which Musk and DOGE took over and made a central hub for their mass purge. The subject line reads: “What did you do last week?” The message says: “Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc: your manager. Please do not send any classified information, links, or attachments. Deadline is Monday at 11:59pmEST.” An employee at the U.S. Agency for International Development, which was shuttered by Musk and DOGE and folded into the State Department, tells Rolling Stone that OPM has no legal authority to make such a request, and further notes the message doesn’t even relay Musk’s threat of firing. They add, jokingly: “What are we supposed to respond? They canceled all of our work!”