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What Did You Do On The Job Last Week?
So the latest DOGE-related outrage seems to be a communication on Saturday from Elon Musk demanding that all federal government employees provide, by midnight Monday, a 5-bullet-point list of what they did last week. Mr. Musk’s communication says that failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.
Here’s a Fox News article about lawmakers and leaders calling for civil disobedience; Powerline has also weighed in on the matter.
Federal government employees seem to find this requirement outrageous.
I assume the process dealing with non-responses has some special handling for employees who are on vacation and, therefore, don’t respond — preventing unnecessary fires.
But for most employees, why should this requirement be so difficult? Don’t these employees have existing regular requirements to report status and accomplishments “up the chain”?
Most of my career was working in the law departments of large corporations (Fortune 200-sized). I was always officed on location at a division facility away from corporate headquarters, so I did not see my organizational superiors very often. A substantial part of our work was to either prevent problems from arising or to prevent small problems from becoming big problems. So there were few obvious successes that upper management would notice. There was no way the General Counsel or other “C-Suite” executive could know what we did unless we told them. And I didn’t micromanage the people who reported to me, so I needed them to tell me on occasion what they had accomplished so I could pass that on to the C-Suite executives. Regular status and accomplishment reports were a normal part of our work.
Since I have also worked in private law practice in which I had to send clients bills for work I had done, I viewed status and progress reports to corporate management as similar to bills to clients: Describe the work I had done so that they would be so happy with what I had done for them, hoping that they would immediately pay the bill (or in the employment situation pay my corporate salary and benefits).
It might take more than the two minutes Mr. Musk claims to come up with a good 5-bullet-point list of the week’s work accomplishments, but it shouldn’t be particularly difficult. It’s necessary in any large organization in which the people at the very top can’t keep tabs on every detail going on in the organization at all times.
(I also think it’s valuable for employees to update their resumes frequently, even if they have no intention of changing jobs, so they are prepared to explain why they deserve a raise and/or so they can identify skills or accomplishments they’d like to have on their resumes that they don’t currently have.)
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I also heard that Kash Patel is saying, not so fast, for the FBI. He wants a chance to review the department and personnel first. I’m glad he spoke up, and he makes a good point. Speed is not always a good thing.
I predict epic wrongful firing suits arising out of this. Employees will win some in the DC courts but I think Missouri or Florida and such will go spectacularly the other way. The Bee better move quickly on this or all of the best gags will be played out in the courts before they got their shot in.
It’s simple: don’t use the responses as a basis of termination. Use whether the person responded as the basis.
I also don’t mind if it goes nowhere because it’s the start of a culture of accountability, of answering to others about their work.
DoD is doing the same thing as Patel. This is the instruction a friend of mine received from her dept regarding the Musk email.:
DoD personnel may have received an email from OPM requesting information. The Department of Defense is responsible for reviewing performance of its personnel and it will conduct any review in accordance with its own procedures. When and if required, the Department will coordinate responses to the email you received from OPM. For now, pause any response to the OPM email titled, “what did you do last week.”
If this were being done correctly and for the right reasons, we’d see a bunch of boring accounting types, not a celebrity like Musk, assigned to the task of determining where the cuts should be. They would come back in 3 months with a report, which would be reviewed by Trump and his advisors. He’d then hold an Oval Office address to explain it, and then start the cuts.
The real reason for this is to ferret out fake employees on the payroll; salaries that are being paid out to people who are not real, or are dead, or who left but the database wasn’t updated. Elon mentions this in a later tweet.
If this were being done correctly by private industry standards, affected employees would be told on a Friday, after their network accounts were disabled, to clear out their desks and leave the premises. Sometimes the terms of their separation are provided then, sometimes not until later.
I thought that DOGE was not even an actual government department. I thought the premise was that DOGE would find problems and report them to the Executive and Legislative branches, to decide what to do. Elon Musk has the authority to demand that every federal employee explain him/herself to Musk? And then Musk gets to fire them? This does not seem like a good plan.
I was doing this for practically every job I had. It was my weekly status report.
I did something like this at my first job, and kept it up as I changed jobs. Some of my superiors/managers loved it and had the rest of the team do it too. One told me when I was leaving that he particularly liked the problems/roadblocks section because solving them became his goals for the next week.
Heaven forfend! Can such chicanery actually be occurring? Is water wet?
Musk often has a good idea that is not implemented perfectly at the beginning. I like that he is willing to put an idea out there and then adjust it to make it better. For example, when one of his early rockets blew up two minutes and some seconds into flight, he announced it was a success because the goal had been to fly for at least two minutes and this would give them a lot of material to learn from. In contrast, NASA would have launched a multi-year investigation into the loss of the rocket, produced a giant report, and then not implemented any of the ideas.
This is the good start of an accountability system for government employees. Maybe the accountability for law enforcement and military personnel needs to be handled a little differently. Maybe the reply or lack of one shouldn’t be the basis for immediate termination. But Musk got the idea out there. Now it can be implemented and improved.
This. No show jobs and padded payrolls are amongst the oldest forms of corruption, they were probably doing it in First Dynasty Egypt. Something like this is a good way to smoke it out, and might also have a positive side effect of identifying those who are actually on the ball / job.
Although Musk tweeted about it first, the actual e-mail to employees came from the Office of Personnel Management. And the e-mail did not include the part about failure to respond being deemed a request for termination. OPM already tweeked Musk’s concept to improve it since there is no way it could legally be deemed a request for termination.
As namlliT noD pointed out, the greatest benefit will come from collecting the list of employees and e-mails that don’t respond and seeing what is up with them. Were they on vacation or so busy watching porn on government laptops that they didn’t have time to respond?
DOGE replaced the US Digital Service (an actual agency), and has now, I believe, absorbed the Office of Personnel Management, or the OPM has been placed under their authority. It’s something along those lines.
The vehemence of the response of the federal government employees is where I get fascinated. This is now the third? fourth? issue in which federal government employees have responded in outrage to demands or events that approximate demands employees in the business world deal with often. Offers of employment buyouts. Potential for layoffs. Comply with office policies. Explain your contributions to the enterprise.
People in the “private sector” hear the caterwauling from the federal government employees and say either, “Whatcha bellyaching about? We’ve been doing this for decades.” Or, “Welcome to the real world.”
The bullet points for accomplishments took the least time of the things I reported weekly. I’d just note them as I finished them. It took ten minutes, fifteen tops.
I’ve done it on my own initiative when I was at a remote location, and it was the best possible use of my time. It helped me be more focused on accomplishing things. And when I felt like I had accomplished nothing and was discouraged about my job, it often reminded me that I had actually done some good things that week.
I had a brief discussion recently with a person who pointed out that Elon Musk is not an auditor. Why, this person asked, would we not have a professional auditor leading the charge for DOGE? I wonder whether by going through ordinary channels and procedures if a report would actually come back in three months or whether the bureaucracy would delay, obfuscate, leak to the hostile press, set up innumerable lawsuits and injunctions and otherwise assure that in the end nothing would have happened of any substance.
The bureaucrats are doing that now of course, but they have had to scramble. By doing things the “correct” way would the swamp be enabled to just run out the clock for the next four years? Congress has a year to make a budget, but somehow it doesn’t seem to get done anymore. I am concerned that a normal audit at this stage would be more of the same.
You’re right! These agencies have audit after audit over the years and it’s made absolutely no difference. It’s time to get deadly serious, and that is what Trump and Musk are doing!
I like RFK Jr’s culling method:
That’s where leadership is supposed to play a role. And good communication. To overcome the bureaucratic threat that is always there. My concern is that this is being done so haphazardly that the Dems will exploit any screw up…like people suddenly not getting their social security checks or a myriad other scenarios…for the midterms. But whether Trump has that leadership or communication potential is an open question anyway. So maybe this is the best we can expect.
Have you people never watched Yes Minister/ Yes Prime Minuster?
The bureaucracy always obfuscates, delays and fights back. Sure, we could try an orderly process with requests for studies and responses by responsible parties. And then nothing will happen as a result.
Go in, kick some tables over, break a few things, dont give them time to formulate a counterattack. It’s the only way to get anything significant accomplished.
It’s another embarrassment for the DOGEbags demonstrating they don’t have a clue about how the federal government works.
The State Department and several other organizations have already informed their employees to ignore Musk’s demand: Some US agencies tell workers not to reply to Musk’s ‘What did you do last week’ email.
Nuke ’em from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
In public and on Twitter, Musk is the face of the DOGE clusterlay, but in court defending against the inevitable lawsuits, administration lawyers claim that Musk just stops by now and again to offer a few words of advice and that’s the entirety of his involvement. What is it with Trump and lies?
They demonstrated that they know EXACTLY how the federal government works and that we can’t expect to get a different result if we keep trying to cut government the same old way.
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114055478149078818
David Lowery of Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker:
Some lefty friends were ranting last week about the “chaos” the DOGE activities were causing (most of them have children who are federal government employees). They grudgingly acknowledged that there might be some aspects of the government that could be streamlined, but thought there should be a more orderly way of doing so. I didn’t want to start an argument (I have started plenty in this group by challenging the left-wing assumptions), so I kept quiet, but I thought about the 40+ years of “orderly” streamlining that has accomplished essentially nothing, so why should I expect a new “orderly” process to accomplish anything different?
Not that I’m taking the side of the Federal worker, but as a consummate plagiarizer myself:
What’s so freaking difficult to take the official job description associated to your particular job and crafting a quick email reply with 5 points which address the official job description ….
If you find the whole process to be BS, then hand DOGE back some more BS.
With a vast number of Federal workers replying to DOGE, it would be an arduous task for DOGE to confirm and prove whether your reply is BS.
It appears like a DOGE attempt to weed out (D)Lefty true believers in the Federal workforce so ideologically committed in the (D)Left owns the Federal workforce that some of these (D)Leftists are willing to die on the I’m not gonna reply to DOGE hill.