Workers around the federal government are scrambling to figure out how and if they should respond to an all-government email sent Saturday at the behest of Elon Musk asking them to list five things they did at work within the last week. During the confusion caused by Musk’s email, workers at the Treasury Department received an email from a former Heritage Foundation staffer who is not the Treasury Secretary from an email address that billed itself as being from “Secretary of the Treasury.”
How and whether to respond to the “What did you do last week” email has itself resulted in much discussion and confusion, and efforts to clarify any confusion have resulted in additional confusion as well as worries about sharing classified or otherwise private information. FBI employees were told by new FBI director Kash Patel not to respond to the email, so were members of the military. Musk tweeted “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”
The Treasury Department email, seen by 404 Media and currently being discussed widely on Reddit, came from an email address with the name “*Secretary of the Treasury” but signed by John W. York, who is not the Secretary of the Treasury and who previously worked for the Heritage Foundation, the architects of Project 2025. The current Secretary of Treasury is Scott Bessent, not York. Treasury workers seem to not know who York is or why he is sending emails from an email address previously used by past Secretaries of Treasury.
“It was used in the past rarely: wishing Treasury employees a Merry Christmas or noting there is a return to office mandate,” one source told 404 Media about the email address York’s email came from. “In the past, the emails included the title of the sender (Sec of Treasury, for example) and more often than not a picture of said person. Like when Steven Mnuchin sent emails ordering the evacuation of the buildings in 2020, they had his face on the email. No such embellishments this go round.”
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Do you know anything else about what's happening with the 'What did you do last week' email? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at jason.404. Otherwise, send me an email at [email protected]. In the email, York tells workers that they must respond to the “What did you do last week” email: “Given the voluminous and extremely important work that Treasury staff perform [sic] on a daily basis, we expect that compliance will not be difficult or time consuming.”
“Your responses should be descriptive enough to show the significance of the work you performed; however, the descriptions should not reveal confidential, privileged, otherwise non-public, pre-decisional or deliberative aspects of that work, given that these responses will be sent outside Treasury,” he wrote. “If you have any questions about how to respond, please consult with your manager.”
Sources at the Treasury Department told 404 Media that they have not previously received any emails from John W. York, that they are not sure what his job is or whether he actually works for the Treasury Department, and that giving descriptive, substantial rundowns of their work tasks without giving “non-public” or sensitive information is not an easy task.
“John York had no title associated with his signature line (unusual as ALL Fed service employees are proud to put their title, Dept, etc in the sig line as a default),” one source told 404 Media. Employees at the Treasury Department have been doing research on York to attempt to figure out who he is. York worked for the Heritage Foundation before joining the Office of Personnel Management towards the end of Trump’s first term. His LinkedIn says he has worked as a “Strategic Human Capital Lead” at Accenture since March 2021. The Treasury Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment about whether he is now a Treasury Department employee.
Top comments on a Reddit post discussing this email are “Who the fuck is John W. York?” and “Schrodinger's phishing email. you're fired if you respond. you're fired if you don’t.”
Other federal employees tell 404 Media that they have been receiving similar clarification emails from agency heads about how and whether to respond, and have been getting follow up emails from their supervisors about what to say if the things they work on are classified. The majority of these emails, which 404 Media is not sharing specifics on because they were in many cases sent to small teams of people, are begging employees to respond to the “What did you do last week emails” while threading the needle of sharing specifics but not sharing private or confidential information.
