JUST IN: Federal unions challenge Elon Musk’s email ultimatum demanding government workers justify their jobs by midnight tonight or risk being fired. Read more:

Office of personnel management says Musk ultimatum will not hold
The US office of personnel management has told government HR officials that employees should not feel obliged to respond to email asking them to justify their jobs, undermining billionaire Elon Musk’s ultimatum to federal workers, Reuters reports.

Over the weekend, Musk sent out an email via the OPM to millions of employees demanding that federal workers detail what they do at their jobs in bullet-pointed list or face dismissal. Agency heads have since given workers conflicting advice about whether or not to respond.

As my Guardian colleagues reported earlier:

Musk’s ultimatum was sent out on Saturday in a mass email to federal employees from the office of personnel management (OPM), one of the first federal organs Musk and his team on the so-called “department of government efficiency” infiltrated after Trump was sworn in.

The message gave all the US government’s more than 2 million workers barely 48 hours to itemize their accomplishments in the past week in five bullet points, and in a post on X, Musk indicated that “failure to respond will be taken as a resignation”.

The order provoked instant chaos across the government, with Trump’s own appointed leadership in federal agencies responding in starkly different ways. Workers in the Social Security Administration and the health and human services department were told to comply with the email, and CNN reported that the Department of Transportation ordered all its employees to respond to the Musk email by its deadline. That included air traffic controllers who are currently struggling with severe understaffing and a spate of recent accidents.

Several others agencies told their employees to refrain, including the FBI, where the new director, Trump loyalist Kash Patel, asked agents to “please pause any responses”. At the homeland security department, employees were similarly informed that “no reporting action from you is needed at this time”.

All employees at the Department of Defense, who now answer to the former Fox News host and Trump acolyte Pete Hegseth as defense secretary, were ordered to pause responding to the OPM missive. Employees in other federal departments were told to await further orders or to simply ignore Musk’s edict.