Philadelphia-Area Federal Workers Left Uncertain as OPM Demands a List of Weekly Accomplishments

Federal employees across the country received a short but unsettling question on Saturday: what did you do last week? The message came from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the government's human resources agency, and asked workers to email a list of their accomplishments from the previous week by 11:59 p.m. Monday. It cautioned them not to include classified information, links, or attachments.

The email itself did not say what would happen to those who failed to answer. Elon Musk, however, wrote in a post on X that not responding would be treated as a resignation. On Monday, the messaging remained contradictory. According to the New York Times, President Donald Trump repeated that people who did not respond could be fired, while OPM stated that responding was voluntary.

The confusion hit federal workers in the Philadelphia region and left local union representatives hurrying to advise their members. The email arrived after a series of upheavals for the federal workforce. On his first day in office, Trump signed executive orders ending remote work for federal employees, freezing hiring, and ending diversity, equity and inclusion work. Employees have since been offered a resignation package worth eight months' pay, and this month layoffs have concentrated on probationary employees.

Philip Glover, national vice president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) District 3, said the first task was simply determining whether the message was genuine. "First we were trying to establish whether it was a real email or not, or whether it was phishing or spam," he said. His district represents about 9,400 federal workers in and around Philadelphia, among roughly 31,000 in Pennsylvania and Delaware.

The union is telling members to check with their own agency before replying. Where an agency wants a response, AFGE recommends that employees first share their list with a supervisor to confirm the information can be released outside the agency, and the union supplied an email template for requesting that guidance. Glover said the union does not want to tell members to disobey management if they have been told to respond. He also noted that some employees might miss the deadline altogether because of their schedules; many work 10-hour days and are typically off on Mondays or Fridays.

Brad Starnes, president of AFGE Local 3631, which represents Environmental Protection Agency workers in Pennsylvania and Delaware, said the request breeds fear and hurts morale, and he called it "harassment." He said the EPA offered no guidance until around noon Monday, when it sent a mass email instructing employees to comply, roughly half a day before the deadline.

Alex Jay Berman, executive vice president of National Treasury Employees Union Chapter 71, which represents IRS employees in Philadelphia, described "confusion" and "disarray" among his members. He said he wants to be sure that employees are not penalized if they make a mistake while responding on short notice and "without any kind of guardrails." Berman rejected the idea that the request was meant to improve understanding of workers' duties or accountability, calling it "unlawful and unrealistic" and "just another step in the harassment, demonization, and punishing of these fine workers."

Resistance has also surfaced at the national level. According to the New York Times, the FBI and the Departments of Defense, State, Energy, Health and Human Services, and Homeland Security have told their employees not to comply with the OPM email.