Federal workers started to receive emails late Friday evening asking them to provide a list of accomplishments from the week, a reprise of a request by Elon Musk that spread fear and confusion through the government just days ago.

Workers at various departments received the email from the Office of Personnel Management, including Defense, Labor and Agriculture, according to copies of emails seen by The New York Times.

The email, titled “What did you do last week? Part II,” echoed an email sent to federal workers last weekend that instructed them to reply with a list of about five accomplishments from their workweek. That blast came shortly after Musk, the billionaire whom President Donald Trump has assigned to shrink the federal workforce, said on social media that it would be coming — and that failure to respond would be “taken as a resignation.”

The message sent out to workers Friday similarly instructed them to send approximately five bullets describing what they achieved this week. It also said that, going forward, employees would be expected to complete the task weekly by Monday at 11:59 p.m. Eastern time.

There were slight differences from the first email. This time, employees who worked only on classified or sensitive activities were instructed to write “all of my activities are sensitive” in response.

Although Musk said he was acting at the encouragement of Trump, the original directive sowed chaos and led to mass confusion across the federal government.

In some cases, federal employees do not have access to their government email when they are not working. Some managers instructed employees to respond, while others told them not to. Privately, some agency leaders worried that complying with Musk’s orders could result in employees revealing national security secrets and other sensitive information. By Monday afternoon, the Office of Personnel Management informed agencies that they did not have to require employees to respond to the original email requesting details of their workweek.

Recent legal challenges have tested the limits of the power that the Office of Personnel Management, the government’s human resources arm, wields over the federal civilian workforce, which is made up of roughly 2.3 million people.

On Thursday night, a federal judge ruled that the agency had exceeded its authority when it issued memos outlining steps to fire most federal employees on probation.

“Congress has given the authority to hire and fire to the agencies themselves,” Judge William Alsup of the Northern District of California said. “The Office of Personnel Management does not have any authority whatsoever, under any statute — in the history of the universe — to hire and fire employees within another agency.”

Judge: Musk isn’t in charge? Really?

Meanwhile Friday, a federal judge said that it seemed “factually inaccurate” for the Trump administration to keep insisting that Elon Musk has no formal position in an operation that has led to mass firings of federal workers and the hobbling of the nation’s foreign aid agency.

Judge Theodore D. Chuang of U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland prodded government lawyers repeatedly for additional clarity on Musk’s role in a case that directly challenges the constitutionality of the task force known as the Department of Government Efficiency.

Until this week, government officials had resisted answering inquiries as to who was formally in charge of the task force, except to say that it was not Musk. (Nor is Musk among its employees, the government said.) On Tuesday, a White House official said that Amy Gleason, a former health care investment executive, was serving as the acting administrator.

On Friday, Joshua E. Gardner, a lawyer in the Justice Department’s civil division, denied that Musk had any role with the Department of Government Efficiency. This despite Musk’s clearly driving its initiatives.

Chuang asked Gardner who had led the agency before Gleason was announced as acting administrator. Gardner said he had not asked, then immediately corrected himself, saying that he had asked but “was not able to get an answer” beyond that it was not Musk.

The judge said he found it “very suspicious” that the government did not have an answer.