The “five things I did this week” email just became a weekly task for Defense civilians.
On Friday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth added to guidance he issued last week, instructing the department’s roughly 760,000 civilian employees to send five bullet points about their weekly achievements no later than noon Eastern time every Tuesday.
Employees—but not troops—will receive a reminder each Friday from a personnel and readiness directorate address, and must respond and copy their immediate supervisors, Hegseth wrote.
“Submissions must exclude classified or sensitive information and will be incorporated into weekly situation reports by supervisors,” the secretary wrote. “Non-compliance may lead to further review.”
The guidance came at the end of the department’s first week trying out the “five bullet points” emails originally ordered by the Office of Personnel Management, a brainchild of the Department of Government Efficiency advisory board at the White House.
The first email went out government-wide on Feb. 22, a Saturday. Several agencies soon sent guidance imploring staff not to respond to that email, considering so many federal employees’ work involves sensitive – often classified – information.
Hegseth told defense employees to disregard that initial email, but subsequently told them to comply with a follow-up.
Now, intelligence organizations are offering a secure option for employees to earnestly report how they spent their weeks, implemented last week with a Monday deadline, a civilian employee, whose identity is being withheld to protect against retaliation, told Defense One.
“Nearly all offices already have weekly reports due internally,” the civilian said. “So we are now doing multiple internal reports – most are extremely in-depth, but now there’s ‘five bullets,’ that we still have not been told what its true purpose is or who will read it. We are in the dark, but it’s the Agency’s honest attempt to follow guidance.”
Almost all of the civilian’s organization responded to a secure email sent to its staff, they estimated, while a majority of the workforce never received the unclassified version.
“It’s an internal joke,” they said. “This is just one more report each week that takes time away from the actually important work we have to do, for which we’re already overworked and underpaid.”
Hegseth’s email says that managers of workers who don’t have regular access to email on the job, including at shipyards and warehouses, “should address directly with their employees.”
Civilians who don’t have email access due to leave, temporary duty or ship work must submit their points within 12 hours of getting back online, he wrote.
“As I have stated before, the civilian workforce remains vital to the Department’s mission, and your critical contributions support our renewed focus on DOD’s core warfighting objectives under President Trump’s leadership,” Hegseth added.
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