TFA: “After thousands of government layoffs, the Office of Personnel Management on Saturday directed federal workers to email a list of roughly five accomplishments”
I was incorrect, and you are right about the order of events in this case, although I don't believe TFA says these 18F employees didn't reply to the email. I noted in an edit that I accidentally pulled a quote from a different article. I believe the gist of what I and others are saying here is still true.
Some other points:
* The second email came "late Friday" and the layoffs happened hours later at 1 am on Saturday, so it's not reasonable to count the second email as a warning or genuine attempt to find the "good" employees. I'm guessing it was just blasted out and happened to land in their inboxes before the firing notice did.
* Based on https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/01/general-services-ad... it appears the entire 18F unit was cut, so this doesn't seem targeted or predicated on email responses. Also, I'm not a leader, but if 100% of my organization didn't comply with an order, cutting them all is probably a much less effective decision than trying to meet them half-way. I guess if they've truly been doing nothing for years, there would be no loss, but that seems unlikely to be true in most cases including 18F's.
* Your initial comment appeared to be speaking generally on DOGE cuts, so it is fair for us to be responding accordingly. 18F seems to have been pretty small, but part of the reason this story is interesting is everything else DOGE is doing. As we've said, plenty of cuts happened before and independent of any email. Personally I'm doubtful that responding does much, but I'd be interested in any reporting on employee's experiences or what DOGE is saying about responses and how it affects their decisions.
Like I said above, I don't think TFA mentioned 18F's responses and there's not really a good reason to assume that the layoffs were due to no response.
> Those impacted in the wee hours of Saturday morning also received emails late Friday from DOGE with the subject line, “What did you do last week? Part II.”
They were asked first last last week. And then again on Friday.
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> According to Politico, the emails — prompting employees to list their weekly accomplishments by Monday — were widely distributed across multiple agencies, including the State Department, the IRS, and the NIH.
These quotes support the existence of the emails, which people here aren't disputing. They say nothing about whether the only layoffs were those who didn't respond, which was implied by your original statement that "the people let go were unable or unwilling to send an email listing 5 things they accomplished in the last week."
I don't care where it's from, it is still false. The layoffs were happening long before this email went out, and the vast majority of them had nothing to do with the email. The threat to fire people over the email was toothless and illegal, and as far as we know from public evidence no one has been fired over it. You have no idea what you're talking about
