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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.)
Discussion (94)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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