Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in a video statement released Sunday directed Department of Defense (DOD) civilian employees to respond to an email from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) asking them to list five accomplishments from the prior week.
He said responses would inform efforts to streamline the civilian workforce. Earlier this month, he announced the DOD was cutting an initial tranche of 5,400 probationary civilian employees out of approximately 50,000 probationary employees and a total of about 250,000 civilian workers.
He said in his statement, “On February 22 of this year, OPM sent an email to all federal civilians asking them to provide, you remember this, approximately five bullets of what they did last week, describing their accomplishments. Well, the Department of Defense employees received direction to, at first, just initially pause responding to this request to OPM … because we do, we work on topics of national security, of sensitivity, of classification, we needed to be careful on that front.”
He added, “I am now directing each member of the department’s civilian workforce, just civilians, to provide those five bullets on what they accomplished in their specific jobs last week, to reply to that email and cc their immediate supervisor.”
He indicated that it was a “pulse check,” echoing what Elon Musk, who is leading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and was behind the email, has said.
President Donald Trump, last week before a Cabinet meeting, also said it was to check if employees were showing up to work and still working for the government. “A lot of people are not answering because they don’t even exist,” he said.
Hegseth added in his video:
It’s a simple task, really, as Elon said, as the president recognized in our first Cabinet meeting, just to pulse check, ‘Are you there?’ out to DOD civilians now.
All those DOD civilians will receive an email outlining the next steps they need to take in order to comply with this initiative, and then the reports will be consolidated internally within the department to comply with the OPM directive.
It’s really simple and straightforward. The directive to civilian employees will be to reply to the email, cc your supervisor, provide without any classified or sensitive information, basic topics of what you did last week, and that we will take that into consideration as we make sure we’re being as focused and as tailored as possible in looking at how we streamline our workforce to both meet the fiscal demands of the moment but also ensure we have the strongest, most viable fighting force in the world.
In his release, Hegseth recognized the contributions of the DOD workforce, but added, “It’s a really big workforce.”
“We’ve got a lot of civilian patriots who dedicate themselves to defending this nation while working here at the Department of Defense. And a lot of them, many of them, most of them, are critical to our national security. And as we work to restore focus on DOD’s, core war fighting mission under President Trump’s leadership, we recognize that we cannot accomplish that mission without the strong and important contributions of our civilian workforce, but it’s a really big workforce as well, which we recognize now,” Hegseth said.
Musk posted on X to Hegseth, “Much appreciated @SecDef Hegseth!”
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