Shortly before 11 a.m. on Sunday, the 80,000 physicians, health scientists, disease detectives, and others tasked with safeguarding the nation’s health received instructions to respond to an email sent the day before asking them, “What did you do last week?”

The email arose from a Saturday dispatch issued by President Donald Trump on the social-media platform he owns, Truth Social. “ELON IS DOING A GREAT JOB, BUT I WOULD LIKE TO SEE HIM GET MORE AGGRESSIVE,” he wrote.

The response from Elon Musk arrived seven hours later on the social-media platform he owns, X. The billionaire Trump confidant leading the effort to slash the federal workforce wrote that afternoon that he was acting on Trump’s “instructions” and ensuring that “all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week.”

The result was a government-wide email directing federal workers to detail their accomplishments over the previous week, in five bullet points. Musk wrote on X: “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”

The directive sent agencies scrambling to tell their employees what to do. Some instructed them not to respond. Others made clear that a reply was mandatory. And then there was the Department of Health and Human Services—an epicenter of the chaos engulfing Washington.

“This is a legitimate email,” read Sunday morning’s instructions from HHS, which advised employees to respond by the deadline set for 11:59 p.m. ET on Monday.

But later that day, the directions changed. Employees were told to “pause” answering the email, according to new guidance sent Sunday at 5 p.m., which pointed to concerns about the sensitivity of department business. HHS promised that updated guidance would arrive Monday at noon.

By late afternoon on Monday, many federal health workers had left their offices with no new guidance, uncertain about whether to respond to the email and whether ignoring it would jeopardize their jobs.

They didn’t know that the federal government’s main personnel agency, which had sent Saturday’s government-wide email, had quietly instructed agencies midday Monday that a response was voluntary. Those instructions effectively rescinded Musk’s threats.

For Musk, the episode was a setback. For federal workers struggling to get their bearings, they told us it was just one more reason to feel both fury and fear.

“This whole administration is a fucking train wreck,” a federal health official said.

The shifting and contradictory instructions divided Trump’s Cabinet, and for the first time, created daylight between Musk and the White House. Even before the administration formally conceded that responses were voluntary, Trump advisers had privately signaled support for agency heads who told their employees not to reply to the email, owing to the sensitivity of their work.

Most of the pushback to the Musk directive came from the country’s national-security agencies, including the CIA, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security. A senior official at NASA, which advised employees not to respond, called the request an “unprecedented ask and unprompted attack on our workforce” in a weekend email to employees that was described to us. A deputy commander at the Navy told people in his chain of command, “Please do NOT respond at this time,” accenting his order using bold red text.

The cascading series of contradictory guidance reflected the unusual balance of power between Trump and Musk, and the unpredictable consequences for millions of federal workers. “It’s a psyop,” said a senior official at the Department of Veterans Affairs, referring to a psychological operation, in this case intended to intimidate federal workers. “It’s a form of harassment. But there’s no one to complain to because no one knows exactly where it’s coming from or who’s behind it.”  

The president’s Saturday morning post spurred Musk to confer with his deputies at the Department of Government Efficiency and develop the hastily written email, according to a White House official. The email was sent by the Office of Personnel Management, now staffed at senior levels by Musk’s deputies. They told agency employees that they intended to use artificial intelligence to analyze the responses and develop reports about further changes to the federal workforce, according to an OPM official familiar with their comments.

Two senior administration officials said that the haphazard nature of Musk’s directive rankled some in the West Wing, as concerns grow that the billionaire’s authority is encroaching on the power of Cabinet secretaries.

Trump, for his part, publicly backed Musk’s effort. “I thought it was great because we have people that don’t show up to work and nobody even knows if they work for the government,” the president told reporters during an appearance Monday with French President Emmanuel Macron. “What he’s doing is saying, ‘Are you actually working?’ And then if you don’t answer, you’re sort of semi-fired or you’re fired, because a lot of people are not answering because they don’t even exist.”

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt also defended the actions: “This was the president’s direction to Elon, and it is being carried out as planned,” she said. “Everyone at the White House knew very well that it was coming.”

The same can’t be said for other parts of the federal government, where agency heads were caught off guard and many recipients mistook the email for phishing. Employees on leave or on vacation feared that they would lose their job. At HHS, department leadership was given just a five-minute warning before the email went out, a senior official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told his staff on Monday, according to people familiar with his account. HHS did not respond to a request for comment.

Some of the agencies that advised employees to respond to Musk’s email sought to justify the request in guidance issued on Monday. John W. York, a senior counselor to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, told employees, “The OPM message reflects an effort to increase accountability by the federal workforce, just as there is in the private sector. Given the voluminous and extremely important work that Treasury staff perform on a daily basis, we expect that compliance will not be difficult or time-consuming.”

Around 5 p.m. Monday, HHS finally issued new guidance affirming that a reply was not mandatory but warning employees who did detail their professional activities to protect sensitive data. “Assume that what you write will be read by malign foreign actors and tailor your response accordingly,” the guidance stated.

Meanwhile, there were signs that OPM was working to make parts of the Musk directive permanent, at least within the agency. In an email to employees Monday evening, OPM’s acting director wrote that he had asked the chief human capital officer to “operationalize this exercise” so that employees continue to “submit weekly accomplishment bullets.”

In certain corners of the federal government, workers made light of the Musk request. One Pentagon official told a colleague that his reply would include time spent on Fox News, Truth Social, and X—more reliable sources of information about the terms of his employment than his own bosses.

“Who are we taking orders from?” the Pentagon official said. “No one really knows.”

“Can you never do that again?” my son texted me on Monday in our family group chat. I had sent a series of photos of my flight in the tiny Cessna Caravan that had just flown my mortal being 120 miles, from Chicago O’Hare International Airport to West Lafayette, Indiana. The nine-seat aircraft, which runs on a single turboprop engine, was so small that the ground crew had to weigh luggage and passengers in order to distribute their weight evenly in the cabin. It was, in short, the kind of plane that makes it easy to fear for your life. By contrast, I hadn’t been concerned at all—and my son had found no cause to worry—about the American Airlines regional jet that I’d taken on the first leg of my trip, from St. Louis to Chicago.

Just a few days later, an American Airlines regional jet collided with a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter in Washington, D.C., killing everyone involved: 60 passengers, four crew members, and three service members. The National Transportation Safety Board has said it will take at least a year to identify a final probable cause of the crash. Until then, one can only guess that the aircrafts and their machinery were not themselves to blame. The New York Times has reported that the relevant air-traffic-control tower may have been understaffed and that the helicopter might have been outside its flight path. As Juliette Kayyem wrote for The Atlantic yesterday, a rise in flight traffic has been increasing the risk of midair collisions for years, especially in busy airspace such as Washington’s.

[Read: The near misses at airports have been telling us something]

Statistically, for now at least, flying is still much safer than driving. According to the International Air Transport Association, on average a person would have to travel by plane every day for more than 100,000 years before experiencing a fatal accident. A host of factors has made flying more reliable, among them more dependable equipment, better pilot training, tighter regulations, stricter maintenance standards, advances in air-traffic control, and improved weather forecasting. But the amorphous, interlocking systems that realize commercial flight are hard to see or understand, even as they keep us safe. For ordinary passengers—people like me and my son—any sense of danger tends to focus on the plane itself, because the plane is right in front of us, and above our heads, and underneath our feet, and lifting us up into the sky. A fear of flying makes little sense, because flying is just physics. One really fears airplanes, the aluminum tubes in which a fragile human body may be trapped while it is brought into flight. A machine like that can crash. A machine like that can kill you.

The Boeing 737 Max’s recent string of mishaps, including two fatal accidents in 2018 and 2019, and, more recently, a lost door during flight, are still fresh in the minds of passengers, and history only reinforces the fear. In 1950, a TWA Lockheed Constellation en route from Mumbai to New York crashed when its engine caught on fire and detached. In 1979, another engine detachment on a DC-10 wide-body jet caused the crash of American Airlines Flight 191. In 1988, an Aloha Airlines Boeing 737 lost an 18-foot-long section of upper fuselage on the way from Hilo to Honolulu. Human error—a contributing factor in most crashes, if not their direct cause—can also stem from equipment failure, as in the case of Pan Am Flight 812 in 1974 and Air France Flight 447 in 2009.

Yet the salience of an airplane’s actual machinery has been fading too. For passengers, the experience of commercial flight may be worse than ever, but the planes themselves now seem more reliable and more accommodating (if only so many passengers weren’t packed into them). Twenty years ago, regional flights would commonly use turboprops to transport passengers between hubs and small-to-medium-size cities. These planes were louder and bumpier. Flying in them felt worse, and it inspired more anxiety for that reason.

Are little turboprops actually more dangerous than jets? A direct comparison is difficult, because the smaller planes are often used for shorter flights, and more flights mean more takeoffs and landings—when most accidents occur. But the numbers are somewhat reassuring overall, at least when it comes to commercial flight. (The numbers for general aviation, which includes recreational planes, skydiving operations, bush flying, and the rest of civilian noncommercial flight, are less reassuring.) The NTSB filed investigations into eight fatal aviation accidents in the United States from 2000 to 2024 that involved commercial aircraft with turboprop engines, and 13 for aircraft with turbo fans (the most common passenger-jet engine).

In any case, modern airport logistics, just like modern jumbo jets, have helped build a sense of safety—or at least hide a source of fear. U.S. passengers used to board and disembark their flights from the tarmac with more regularity. This was true of prop planes and bigger jets alike. The shrill whine of turbines and the sweet smell of aviation fuel made the mechanisms of flight more palpable; it reminded you that you were entering a machine. Nowadays, that reality is hidden. You board comfortable, quiet cabins from the climate-controlled shelter of jet bridges.

All of these changes have tamped down the fear of planes to the point that, for many passengers, it will now resurface only under certain throwback conditions—such as when I found myself bobbing over the Hoosier farms in a plane cabin the size of a taco truck. That sort of white-knuckling is a distraction from the truer, more pervasive risks of air travel in 2025. The systemic lapses and conditions that have produced frequent near misses in aviation, and that may have contributed to this week’s accident, now seem likely to worsen under the Trump administration, which has purged the Aviation Security Advisory Committee, fired the head of the Transportation Security Administration, and blamed DEI for a fatal crash.

[Read: Is there anything Trump won’t blame on DEI?]

The nation’s pervasive weakness in aviation safety is genuinely scary, but it’s shapeless, too. It provokes the sort of fright that you feel in your bones, the sort that makes you entreat a loved one to please never fly in one of those again, okay? And yet, I might well have been safer in the cold cabin of a turboprop 5,000 feet above Indiana than I would have been on an approach to an overcrowded, understaffed airport in a quiet regional jet. The plane still seems like the thing that might kill you. Even now, I suspect it always will.