The janitor at Health and Human Services:
- Swept floor
- Mopped floor
- Cleaned bathroom
- Changed empty toilet paper roll
- Emptied waste baskets
The lab tech at the FBI:
- Cleaned slides
- Changed chemical in test tube
- Prepared slide
- Observe slide
- Filled out report on slide
The Park Ranger:
- Opened gate
- Walked along trail
- Answered question about where the bathroom were
- Told visitors to stay on trail
- Closed gate
Secretary at Defense Department:
- Sorted mail
- Opened mail
- Took notes on what to do with mail
- Typed reply to mail
- Filed mail
Elon Musk’s email demanding an explanation “to understand” what federal employees did last week was one of the most ludicrous acts ever perpetrated. No matter how cool SpaceX may be, grabbing rockets from midair, or how ridiculous he looked wielding a chainsaw at CPAC like a three-year-old hopped up on gummies, his email was the act of a moron.
A great many necessary jobs are routine and entirely uninteresting, but necessary to the functioning of an office, a department and a government. But even the upper level positions, exercising some degree of discretion or expertise, would produce no bullet points of value.
CIA analyst:
- Listened to wiretaps
- Listened to wiretaps some more
- More listening to wiretaps
- Still more wiretaps.
- Only 10,000 hours of wiretaps to go
Did Musk think the reply would be “caught Ukrainian spy on Monday, terrorist on Tuesday and prevented three separate bombings on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday”?
Even more ludicrous is that Musk would fire personnel whom the various secretaries, directors and deputies recognized as valuable to their departments because they were busy undercover actually finding a terrorist rather than sitting in the office reading and replying to Musk emails.
NIH cancer researcher:
- Collected samples from research subjects
- Prepared slides with samples collected from research subjects
- Put slides into testing equipment
- Ran testing equipment
- Documented negative results
IRS customer service representative:
- Answered taxpayer telephone calls
- Asked callers to wait so I could research their question
- Looked through documentation to find answers to questions
- Informed callers that I was unable to find an answer to their questions
- Asked callers if there was anything else I could help them with
That this needs to be explained in a way more suited to a wayward child than someone authorized to vote is a sad and pathetic reflection on the state of affairs in America.
Presumably, Musk (who is definitely not in charge of DOGE per government court filings) and otherwise devoid of any authority to either make demands of federal government employees or to terminate them, but for a president who says otherwise, will take a two-tier approach to his “what did you do last week” email. Those who fail to reply will be terminated, and their missile silos will just have to maintain themselves.
Those who do reply will have their responses vetted by keyword, since nobody is going to actually read millions of emails, and even if they did, they wouldn’t have the capacity to understand or appreciate the value or necessity of the myriad tasks performed across all federal functions, mundane or complex, short or long term, critical or discretionary. Rather, the responses will go through a keyword grinder looking for red flags like “ran DEI training session,” “watched old episodes of Joy Reid” or “gave lucrative federal contracts to transexual black women.”
If you can’t trust a genius like Musk to come up with the best way to cull the herd of wasteful federal employees, who can you trust? Then again, even federal bathrooms need new rolls of toilet paper when the old ones run out.
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Now the OPM has issued further guidelines on what managers are supposed to do in terms of response, non-responses, and absences.
We’re reaching millions of dollars of waste at this point. Probably could have kept a few more employees at the park service.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Gkmr6t_bkAUGgjF?format=jpg&name=medium
Obviously no real needs assessment of any kind has been underway. These are basically random spending cuts. It is 100% possible to do this with any public budget, but some things are likely to go wrong.
Remembered the word Person
Remembered the word Woman
Remembered the word Man
Remembered the word Camera
Remembered the word TV
Trump actually claimed that Elon showed “a lot of genius in sending it [the items email]” and explained why;
“You know why he wanted that, by the way? I thought it was great, because we have people who don’t show up to work, and nobody even knows if they work for the government. So, by asking the question, ‘Tell us what you did this week,’ what he’s doing is saying, ‘Are you actually working?’ And then, if you don’t answer, like, you’re sort of semi-fired or you’re fired, because a lot of people are not answering because they don’t even exist.
That’s how badly various parts of our government were run by, and especially by this last group. So, what they’re doing is trying to find out who’s working for the government, are we paying other people that aren’t working, and where is all this—where has the money gone?”
I trust that’s perfectly clear.
Clear as mud. Thanx Hal for your contribution to this very profound debate. Tell us what you had for breakfast this morning, Mr. President; and by the way, what productive activities you have planned for the remainder of the day? Do not choke on us, or projectile vomit in the process! Don’t grab any women either.
Without disputing the outrageousness of some of Dlon’s recent activities, I’d like to offer that Dlons’s actions are not as strange as they might sound. I serve on the board of a company whose biggest customer (publicly traded) is doing almost what Dlon is doing. Chaos!!
I understand that Dlon’s legal authority to act and the evident conflicts of interest are serious problems when the federal government is involved. And I understand that the messaging is atrocious. But his reckless disregard for employees is not uncommon. Remember Chainsaw Al? The idea is to hire younger, less entrenched workers for positions that are identified as necessary. The chaos will last for around 2 years and then will be forgotten.
Admittedly, I have no empathy or sympathy for non-healthcare federal employees. For the most part, this assault could not happen to a more deserving group of people. Still, it’s chaos.
The best sentence in your post: “That this needs to be explained in a way more suited to a wayward child than someone authorized to vote is a sad and pathetic reflection on the state of affairs in America.” That one’s a keeper.
Here’s something suited for a wayward child, careful you don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. You could do with some more empathy and sympathy. Likewise, I’m tired of the lazy conflation of business with government. The South African is plainly out of his depth.
“You could do with some more empathy and sympathy.”
I’ll definitely pass on that. For the most part, federal workers have earned their terrible reputation.
I just recently retired from a large defense company. I worked in support of generating technical publications. The programs that I supported all had federal workers attached to them. All of them. Although our customers were the US Army, US Navy and USMC, the people who managed those weapons programs were civilian federal workers. People who are professionals and knew their jobs. Your generalization of “federal workers” is sloppy and uncalled for.
They probably won’t just keyword search it, they’ll also have interns feed it to an AI.
This was brilliant. It was a simple test. There’s lots of people who mistakenly believe they don’t report to the president. If you wanted a quick way to determine who’s going to rebel, sabotage, and otherwise refuse to follow the direction of the administration this is it. Especially at the supervisory level telling others to disregard. The list of people to at least be investigated or otherwise purged creates itself. Midwits never see it coming.
[Ed. Note: I posted this comment, rather than trash it, so others will remember that there are people who not only believe this is brilliant, but that they are brilliant as well.]
So what did you do at work last week? I’ll let Mr. Musk know at his earliest convenience.
All I can say is “WHAAAAA!!!”
Welcome to my life. My boss has meetings three times a week to discuss our tasks lists and what we are doing. Every Tuesday a group message goes out stating to reply with “What did you do yesterday, what are you doing today and what are you planning to do tomorrow?” It sucks but it is part of the job.
You don’t like the job requirements, find another.
(Ed. Note: This is not a job requirement. This is a Musk requirement.)
If it takes 5 minutes to write 5 bullet points, and if there are 2 million federal workers, then it would take them 170,000 person-hours to complete this request. It has been reported that the responses will be fed into a large language model. My judgment is that no useful information about someone’s job can be gleaned in this manner; therefore, it was a mammoth waste of resources. Someone should let DOGE know.