OPM officially sunsets ‘five bullets’ emails for federal workers

The Office of Personnel Management has officially halted its efforts to collect five bullet points from federal workers about what they did the previous week, indicating it will instead support agency-based performance management.

“We communicated with agency HR leads that OPM was no longer going to manage the five things process nor utilize it internally,” OPM Director Scott Kupor said in a written statement. “At OPM, we believe that managers are accountable to staying informed about what their team members are working on and have many other existing tools to do so.”

The news was originally reported by Reuters and comes a week after Kupor told FedScoop he would review the initiative to see if it was adding value. He also indicated that artificial intelligence was used to analyze those emails, partly confirming reports that the technology was used to review those messages — though Kupor said it likely wasn’t an in-depth analysis. 

The five bullets emails were first announced in February by then DOGE-affiliated Elon Musk on his social media site X. He threatened that if people didn’t respond, it would be “taken as a resignation.” 

That effort was immediately met with caution from agencies, which in some cases told workers to respond carefully and in others told workers not to respond. It also prompted concerns about the security of that information, particularly given the agency’s history with a 2015 cyber breach that exposed personally identifiable information of roughly 22 million people.

Musk has since left the government after an apparent falling out with President Donald Trump, and the DOGE doesn’t currently have anyone located at OPM, which was once a hub for the efficiency group. Kupor told FedScoop last week that DOGE was a “catalyst,” but now it’s time to put efficiency into the agency’s operations.

When asked about those messages in an interview last week, Kupor told FedScoop that the effort had quieted down in recent months and indicated he planned to review its continuation. Following that interview, an agency spokeswoman confirmed that responsive emails were still coming to OPM’s inboxes.

In lieu of the messages, OPM also said Tuesday that it planned to support agencies transitioning to “rigorous performance management” — including regular check-ins — that were called for in a June OPM memo.