Elon Musk’s demand that more than 2 million federal employees defend their work is facing pushback from other powerful figures in the Trump administration, in a sign that the billionaire’s brash approach to overhauling the government is creating division.

On Saturday evening, federal workers received an email telling them to submit five bullet points accounting for their past week, due Monday at midnight Washington time. Musk had previewed the demand in a post on X, the social-media platform he controls.

Yet it didn’t take long for some of President Donald Trump’s hand-picked top officials to rebuff the effort. 

FBI Director Kash Patel, in his first full day on the job, told employees in a memo that he was in charge of reviewing bureau personnel and would coordinate any information needed.

“For now, please pause any responses,” said Patel, who was a stern critic of the agency he now leads and one of Trump’s most ardent defenders. 

In the early days of the Trump administration, when workers from the Department of Government Efficiency began arriving at federal offices, temporary leadership was running much of the day-to-day business of the government.

Now, most departments have a Senate-confirmed cabinet secretary in place, counterbalancing Musk’s proximity to the president and giving many agencies more powerful advocates who can provide a bulwark against DOGE’s directives.

The Department of Defense, run by vocal Trump defender Secretary Pete Hegseth, told its workers in a tweet to “pause” any response to the email and that the Pentagon would “coordinate” any responses “when and if required.”

Officials overseeing all or parts of the State Department and NASA were also told to refrain from replying to the email. 

Employees at the Department of Homeland Security, which includes the Secret Service and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, received an email late on Sunday saying management would respond on behalf of all workers, according to a message seen by Bloomberg News. 

Musk defended the move in a post on X early Monday, calling it a “check to see if the employee had a pulse and was capable of replying to an email.” A CNN poll from last week found that a slight majority of Americans — 54% — say it’s a bad thing that Trump gave Musk such a prominent role in his administration.

“This mess will get sorted out this week,” Musk said in the tweet. “Lot of people in for a rude awakening and strong dose of reality. They don’t get it yet, but they will.”

Since Trump took office last month, Musk’s DOGE team has been dispatched to access sensitive data, organized a buyout program to push employees into “higher productivity” private-sector jobs and fired thousands of probationary employees. 

Despite the resistance by Patel and others, employees of other parts of the government were told to respond to the bullet-point prompt, which was sent from the Office of Personnel Management. 

The Social Security Administration’s human-resources department told staffers in an email that OPM’s request was a “legitimate assignment,” according to a copy of the email viewed by Bloomberg News. 

At the Justice Department, a senior official emailed other agency leaders around the country, telling them to be ready to respond but cautioning care in what they and their staff share. 

“This is an official OPM email address and employees should be prepared to follow the instructions on Monday as requested but be advised that you should not respond with sensitive, confidential, or classified information,” Jolene Ann Lauria, assistant attorney general for administration, wrote on Saturday evening, according to an email seen by Bloomberg News. 

Judicial review

The OPM email was sent out so widely that it even went to some federal judges and their staffs, who under the Constitution work for a separate branch of government and don’t report to the president. 

Federal judges are presiding over the dozens of lawsuits challenging Trump’s executive actions, including Musk’s role in the administration.

The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, which coordinates personnel policy for the judicial branch, sent its employees a message late Saturday suggesting that they not respond to any similar communication from the executive branch, according to an email seen by Bloomberg News. 

“Most of what we do is protected by the Privacy Act as we deal with very sensitive personal information of claimants,” said Judge Som Ramrup, the president of Association of Administrative Law Judges, a union representing Social Security Administration judges. “We cannot discuss or release any information related to any case that we work on. I don’t think there’s any way to realistically provide ‘five bullet points’ about the work we performed last week.”

Employees have received confusing and contradictory instructions on how to handle the email. National Weather Service employees were first told to hold off replying to the email, and then late Sunday instructed workers to answer the request, coordinating the response with their supervisors, according to an email seen by Bloomberg News. 

Workers at the Federal Emergency Management Agency on Sunday morning received instructions to reply to email using “action verbs,” such as “planned, initiated, coordinated.” After the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees FEMA, said it would reply on behalf of the entire department, workers were told to stand down.

Musk said in a tweet on Saturday that “failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.” The Office of Personnel Management said “agencies will determine any next steps.”

OPM doesn’t have the authority, except through regulation, to order another agency’s employees to do anything, said Jim Eisenmann, a partner at Alden Law Group PLLC who advises federal and private-sector employees on employment issues.

“In any legal sense, failing to respond cannot be considered a resignation,” he said of the email.

Musk’s momentum

Trump gave Musk cover to pursue more brazen actions, posting on his Truth Social platform on Saturday that his government efficiency czar was doing a good job, “BUT I WOULD LIKE TO SEE HIM GET MORE AGGRESSIVE.”

A few hours later, Musk put federal employees on notice.

“Consistent with President @realDonaldTrump’s instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week,” he wrote on X.

The email that followed came from an address familiar to more than two million federal workers. It was the same [email protected] address that tried to coax them into voluntarily resigning 25 days earlier. That email, with the subject line “Fork in the Road,” promised workers they would get paid through September if they left in February. 

Only 75,000 federal workers took the offer — fewer than the 240,000 the White House had hoped. 

Like the “Fork in the Road” missive, Saturday’s email recalled past communications from Musk. The subject line — “What did you do last week?” — echoed the text he sent Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal before he bought the company and fired him. 

Some officials within the Interior Department are concerned that the administration could use their responses to Saturday’s email to justify reneging on the terms of the “Fork in the Road” retirement deal — effectively declaring their accomplishments didn’t justify continuing to pay them through September, one official said, on the condition of anonymity to discuss a private matter. 

A State Department employee who had submitted their resignation via the buyout program still received the email asking for bullet points, according to the employee and emails reviewed by Bloomberg News.

The person replied on Saturday with five bullet points referencing their support of the Trump administration’s goals — including one that noted they had already agreed to leave their job.

Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Chairman Warren Buffett said the company has paid the U.S. government more than $101 billion in taxes since he took the helm 60 years ago, more than any other firm in history, according to his annual letter to investors on Saturday. 

Buffett’s comments come as President Donald Trump has vowed to cut corporate taxes further after slashing them to 21% during his first term in 2017. Trump wants to reduce the corporate tax rate to 15%.

Berkshire paid $26.8 billion in taxes in 2024 alone. Buffett said that “record-shattering” figure amounts to roughly 5% of the total taxes paid by U.S. companies last year, and excludes state taxes and taxes paid to foreign governments.

“If Berkshire had sent the Treasury a $1 million check every 20 minutes throughout all of 2024 — visualize 366 days and nights because 2024 was a leap year — we still would have owed the federal government a significant sum at yearend,” Buffett wrote. 

Berkshire’s 2024 tax bill exceeded that of the previous five years combined, owing in part to his significant sales last year of two of its biggest holdings, Apple Inc. and Bank of America Corp., according to Edward Jones analyst Jim Shanahan.

“He’s boasting about taxes, but it’s kind of an unusual year,” Shanahan said. “I don’t know if he was specifically trying to call out large tech companies that don’t pay much in terms of cash taxes, but certainly if I’m reading between the lines, that’s what I’m seeing.”

Cathy Seifert, an analyst at CFRA, interpreted the comments in a similar way.

“I think the underlying message is: ‘Don’t lump every multibillion-dollar corporation as even; some pay their fair share of taxes’,” Seifert said in an interview. 

Berkshire reported on Saturday that its operating profits for the fourth quarter surged 71%, driven by a nearly 50% jump in insurance investment income and improvement in its insurance underwriting business. Its annual operating earnings rose to $47.4 billion, up nearly 27% from the previous year. 

Vast conglomerate

In the annual letter, Buffett said that when he took control of the Berkshire Hathaway company in 1965, it was a struggling textile operation that paid zero in income taxes that year, and hadn’t for much of the previous decade.

“That sort of economic behavior may be understandable for glamorous startups, but it’s a blinking yellow light when it happens at a venerable pillar of American industry,” Buffett wrote. “Berkshire was headed for the ash can.”

Today, Berkshire Hathaway is a vast conglomerate spanning more than 189 operating companies, a public equity portfolio worth $272 billion and a cash pile worth $334 billion as of the end of 2024, according to the annual report. Buffett said the company’s success is due in large part to America’s capitalist economy, a system that he said has its faults — “in certain respects more egregious now than ever” — but also “can work wonders unmatched” by other models. 

Buffett also credited Berkshire’s investors for foregoing dividends to reinvest their income, noting that the company only paid investors one dividend, in 1967. He said he couldn’t recall why he suggested the move to Berkshire’s board, a decision he said “seems like a bad dream.”

Buffett addressed part of the letter to “Uncle Sam.”

“Someday your nieces and nephews at Berkshire hope to send you even larger payments than we did in 2024,” he wrote. “Spend it wisely. Take care of the many who, for no fault of their own, get the short straws in life. They deserve better.”

Seifert called the comments “a subtle yet important swipe” at the current political environment.

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The pricing of accounting services is a big concern and it should be. My definition of pricing services properly is that if, at the end of the year, you’ve made your living, funded your retirement account, and had money left over to maintain and build your infrastructure, you’re pricing your services OK. If you have something left over after that, then good for you, you are doing it right and you should enjoy that profit. But the minimum is the first three things.

I get frequent calls about this. My advice is to increase fees at a uniform percentage to make up for the shortfall going forward. Here is how to go about this.

The first step is to calculate the shortfall. By way of illustration assume you are grossing $250,000 and have a $30,000 shortfall. $30.000 ÷ $250,000 = 12%. This means your fees need to be increased 12% in total. This assumes these are your numbers for the current year. If these are last year’s numbers, then project your shortfall for the current year and use that. 

The second step is to increase the fees for every client immediately by 12%. If you have contracts, you might not be able to do this, but if you have an arrangement that doesn’t lock you into a price no matter what, then increase those clients, which should be most of your clients. If the contractual fees are substantial, then factor that in and you might need a larger percentage increase than the across-the-board calculation.

The third step is to start contacting your larger or more important clients. Start with them but plan on contacting every client. I personally call everyone. They all pay your salary, so make the call. If they were a new client, you would do somersaults to get them. Here, all you need to do is call them. I suggest telling them something similar to this:

“I regret that I have to increase my fees with you. My overall fees are too low and I am not making what I need to provide my living, fund my retirement account and have sufficient funds to maintain my practice with needed maintenance, technology changes and technical update notifications. Accordingly, as much as I hate to do this, I am forced to increase the fees for all of my clients 12% effective the first of next month. This is not something I like to do, but I have to do it so I can continue the level of services my clients are accustomed to and deserve. This is the only way that makes sense. I know you will understand, and if you want to think about it and have another discussion, please call me. I appreciate you being a client and know we will continue our successful collaboration.”

I used an illustrative amount, but this method works for any size practice, from a solo to a large multioffice practice. The reality is that if there is a shortfall, this needs to be done. 

Alternatives like getting more business is a way to grow your practice, but at your present level with the shortfall from your established clients and existing workload, the issue isn’t growth but maintaining the status quo. Being immersed in tax season means now is not a good time, but neither is any other time. Delaying this inevitable action will just make the situation worse. You are a businessperson and need to act like one and your revenues need to reflect this.

Do not hesitate to contact me at [email protected] with your practice management questions or about engagements you might not be able to perform.