Banking regulators varied in their response to a Saturday email from the Office of Personnel Management, directing federal employees to detail what they did in the past week at their jobs.
“Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished this week and cc your manager,” the OPM email read, according to The New York Times. The message came with a deadline of midnight Monday and urged employees not to include “classified information, links or attachments.”
Trump adviser Elon Musk teased the email on social network X shortly before it hit employees’ inboxes.
“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 Saturday in a post. “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”
At least two banking regulators told employees to hold off on responding, pending clarification.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency’s executive committee said Saturday it was “currently reviewing [OPM’s] request to determine appropriate guidelines regarding what information can be shared outside the agency,” according to an email seen by Bloomberg Law. That guidance, though, was set to come by 8 a.m. Monday, the OCC said.
Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. employees, meanwhile, received an email from the agency’s chief information security officer, telling them to await further instructions from the regulator’s leadership, Bloomberg Law reported.
Reaction at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was perhaps more nuanced. The agency’s employees are under a stop-work order from Acting Director Russ Vought.
“CFPB Leadership understands that certain work tasks have stopped,” the bureau’s chief operating officer, Adam Martinez, said in an email, seen by Bloomberg Law. “If you were not able to perform tasks/work as a result, you may reply and simply reference that you were complying with the current work stoppage.”
The National Treasury Employees Union, which represents CFPB workers and is in a legal battle with the bureau’s leadership over the stop-work order and efforts to gut the regulator’s workforce, advised its members not to immediately respond to the OPM email and follow agency guidance.
“Once again, agencies were caught off guard by these emails,” the NTEU wrote, according to Bloomberg Tax.
Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said Saturday’s email “fails to identify any legal authority permitting OPM to demand the requested information,” according to a letter sent to the Trump administration Sunday.
“It is cruel and disrespectful to hundreds of thousands of veterans who are wearing their second uniform in the civil service to be forced to justify their job duties to this out-of-touch, privileged, unelected billionaire who has never performed one single hour of honest public service in his life,” Kelley said in a statement a day earlier. “AFGE will challenge any unlawful terminations of our members and federal employees across the country.”
A purge of probationary employees across various federal agencies continued Friday, as 76 OCC employees were placed on administrative leave until March 8, at which point they’ll be officially terminated, according to an all-staff email from Rodney Hood, the agency’s acting chief.
“On behalf of the Executive Committee, I extend our heartfelt thanks to these employees for their federal service,” Hood wrote in the email, seen by Bloomberg Law. “We remain committed to ensuring a dignified transition process for them and supporting all OCC employees throughout these changes.”
The firing of probationary employees follows similar moves at the FDIC and CFPB. The FDIC terminated roughly 170 probationary employees this month, after others – 500, according to Bloomberg – accepted deferred resignation offers.
The CFPB also terminated roughly 70 probationary employees, then fired another 70 to 100 term employees – those whose contracts have set limits between one and four years.
