There are many others, but two tells the Trump Deranged on my Facebook feed are displaying symptomatic of their malady are the ridiculous obsession with the name change to “Gulf of America,” and most recently, Elon Musk’s email to the Federal workforce.
Yesterday Musk tweeted out, “Consistent with President @realDonaldTrump’s instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week. Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.” And as night follows day, this email from Allan Smith was delivered as promised:
“Subject: What did you do last week?” “Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager.”
Echoing my bizarre Facebook friends, Everett Kelley, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees, sent out a ludicrous statement that read: “It is cruel and disrespectful to hundreds of thousands of veterans who are wearing their second uniform in the civil service to be forced to justify their job duties to this out-of-touch, privileged, unelected billionaire who has never performed one single hour of honest public service in his life. Once again, Elon Musk and the Trump Administration have shown their utter disdain for federal employees and the critical services they provide to the American people.”
This should go into the “Methinks he doth protest too much!” Hall of Fame. As has become all-too familiar, the lazy resorting to ad hominem insults, the certifiably ignorant emphasis on an agent of the President being “unelected,” and the juvenile working class hero smear of a man who has strengthened and benefited his country and its citizens by his industry, boldness and public mindedness are all throbbing evidence of desperation. But throwing a fit because workers are asked to list five things they accomplished on the job in a week?
I doubt that I have ever had a week in my spectacularly varied, eccentric and often failed career when I couldn’t do that. Today is a Sunday. I can list three substantive work-related accomplishments on this single day, and I feel like I didn’t meet my self-identified goals.
If there is a principled, reasonable, logical reason to find that email threatening, demeaning or unfair, I’d love to know what it is.
Ethics Alarms 
A commenter over at Althouse’s thread on this topic stated:
Fortunately, there were many, many other commenters who told this particular one that he had no clue what he was talking about.
In my experience, I’ve had to write up monthly, weekly, even daily reports to my supervisors to help them monitor my activities and progress. When I was a supervisor, I had my employees do the sames, since I could not watch over them the whole day, and the tasks I assigned them might have been superseded by more pressing concerns.
There are speculations that Musk is really fishing for employees who never check their e-mails, and thus are probably doing absolutely nothing. Or maybe he’s trying to start a chain of accountability. I think we’ll only find out as time progresses.
One other commenter on Althouse’s blog made a nod to Milei’s gutting of the Argentinian government, and that the Trump administration was following suit. Another commenter replied that Milei’s efforts were a dumpster fire. That seemed particularly odd, given what I had read said that Argentina’s rampant inflation was finally tamed and the economy was finally lurching forward after decades of stagnation. I’m curious if anyone else knows any more about this?
[Apoplectic Noises]
My private company pulled this exact shit during the pandemic lockdowns but on a daily basis at the REQUEST OF THE GOVERNMENT!
The GOVERNMENT requested that we provide a daily justification for the work we were billing them during mandatory work from home that the GOVERNMENT implemented.
“In my experience, I’ve had to write up monthly, weekly, even daily reports to my supervisors to help them monitor my activities and progress.”
I was going to make this exact point. There are software apps designed to do exactly this. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that at least a plurality of professionals have had some form of regular project management for at least a decade. The idea that not only is this abnormal, but it’s a bad idea, seems particularly blinkered.
Plus, with computer systems, pretty much all work is monitored.
Well, the main reason for the e-mail seems to be to determine how many workers there actually are. Musk and DOGE suspect that there are many ‘ghost employees’ out there and this e-mail is to catch them. There also are employees who really do have jobs, but aren’t doing them. This is to catch the ones who not only don’t check their e-mail, but don’t even listen to any form of media in a 3-day period of time.
I wish I could just send in 5 things I did this week instead of my 15+ hour yearly evaluation gauntlet from multiple administrators and committees. I used to have that as a weekly thing at my job, write up what I did that week and what I was planning on doing the next week. Every Monday, I had to send that in to my boss.
I admit, this might be annoying, but let’s take a look at the things that have been uncovered:
(1) USAID has basically been an embezzlement agency, with money being filtered through NGO’s to influence elections, buy off the media, and enrich any number of influential leftists.
(2) The DoD is missing $35 trillion. It has no idea where it went.
(3) The Treasury Dept has just been paying any invoice sent to it, not matter who it goes to or what it claims to be for. This has been going on for years. The fraud is perhaps $2-3 trillion.
(4) Medicare and Medicaid have sent at least $2.7 trillion to foreigners who aren’t eligible for Medicare of Medicaid, just because they asked for it.
(5) Every single Army base in the US has been stealing the food money from the enlisted. If they live on base, soldiers have a food allowance that is deducted from their pay and given to the base to provide them with food. Every single base has money missing from that fund. The ‘best’ base only lost 50%, the worst lost 88% of the food money. It wasn’t used for some related cost, it just ‘disappeared’. This isn’t one person doing it. It is happening locally on every single base since at least 2019. In 2019, the chairman of the joint chief’s was told to look into and he said ‘no’. Overall, 2/3 of the money has been stolen. This is $150+ million/year. This is just one example of the looting that is going on by the military leadership.
So, our entire national debt is to cover money looted by government officials. I would think they would be hiding out, but I guess they feel entitled to the taxpayer’s money and don’t feel obligated to be inconvenienced even a little bit because of the vast embezzlement that has been going on.
This also seems to be an appropriate fisk of the subject of Jack’s next post!
To put this in perspective, the losses uncovered SO FAR indicate that the AVERAGE federal employee has embezzled over $7 million of the US taxpayers’ money over the last decade or so.
A non-trivial percentage of workforce teams – especially software development teams, but it has migrated to many others as well – implement the “Agile” program. This includes daily stand-up meetings where teammates quickly highlight individual goals from yesterday, what they accomplished towards that goal, and what is being committed to today.
Coming up with five results for any given week should be a trivial matter for any employee actually attempting to accomplish anything for an employer.
The one (sad) benefit of my job is I have to bill for my time, resulting in an almost tedious autobiography. If ever I need an alibi, it’s in my timesheets.
5 accomplishments? That’s easy:
I would have gotten a lot more done, except that #2 took up the majority of my week.
-Jut
Thanks for this, Jut. The first thing that popped into my head when I thought about this email was “TIME SHEETS!” I’d just attach them to my responsive email and say, “Read ’em and weep!” (Thank God it’s been twenty-five years since I last had to fill one out. Although I still have the recurring dream/nightmare I’m working in a firm, it’s the end of the month, and I haven’t done any time sheets and obviously am having no luck whatsoever in creating them after the fact. Hah!)
Old Bill,
I got into the habit of tracking everything on little notepads. At the end of the month (because why would I enter time any sooner than necessary), I spend a few hours just putting all my time in.
just counted them: I have at least 32 of those notepads taking up space in my office.
And, I have no idea how anyone can recreate time from even a few days ago (unless it is trial, or something).
-Jut
It seewms inefficient.
Just ask their managers.
As a homemaker and homeschooling parent, I challenged myself to do this. I had, of course, done these when working as a process engineer, but it isn’t really all that important when you are at home to provide progress reports on a weekly basis. As a process engineer, I had to do this in the private sector with my manager, my manager’s manager, the unit supervisor, and the area manager on a weekly basis, as well as for a much larger section of people, including the manager of the whole refinery, on a monthly basis, and to the VP of refining and the VP of projects usually on a quarterly basis.
While doing this yesterday as a housewife, I first denied credit to myself for the unending tasks that require constant effort, but reminded myself that as a process engineer, I always claimed monitoring catalyst/sorbent activity for seven different substances as well as watching and measuring end-of-run conditions. Those were essential tasks. Therefore, I, as a homemaker, could and should claim such tasks, and I could not fault a government employee for doing the same. After all, some jobs have repetitive tasks each week, as they are essential foci of the job. Here is my list:
Honestly, this was not hard, and took minimal time to write down. I had more trouble deciding on wording and only picking five items of import. If what is standard for a private sector employee and easily done for a housewife is so difficult for a government employee to do, as the liberals seem to be screaming, what are they doing?
10 loads of laundry (the one physical task I can do w/o assistance), ordered groceries, filled out the upcoming calendar of appts/tasks, organized clothing/food for my hubby’s upcoming work week
Researched three new medical specialists and made three upcoming appointments
Planned activities and purchased materials for an upcoming family event
Took care of our special needs dogs (feeding, treats, bladder expressing, vet appointment, cleaning, playtime, and spinal cord stimulation)
Occupational Therapy session for my father who has white matter dementia. (He refuses to go to any type of therapy or facility, so I research methodologies and exercises & have phone sessions and FaceTime sessions with him to improve his brain function.)
I’ve had a few different careers in my 40+ years on earth, some creative, and some requiring rigorous discipline and training (healthcare). I’ve worked for myself as well as in small, family businesses and large companies. I’ve ALWAYS shown my work, or have been ready to do so at a moment’s notice. When did actually working and having something to show for it become passé? When did it become rude or tyrannical to ask someone what the heck they accomplished in a 40 hour work week?I’m disabled now, with four upcoming surgeries, constant pain, and chronic illness that leaves me with frequent brain fog. I could sit on the couch all day and watch tv till I fall asleep, and very few would judge me. But I cannot live that way. If *I* can accomplish things on a daily basis, so can the average federal employee.
We’ve all made jokes about government workers (like those winners at the DMV) over the years. I have ZERO issue with an incredibly brilliant, hardworking, motivated and successful individual like Elon Musk trying to cut government waste down to a minimum. There have been far too many corrupt jacknuts in power for decades who take advantage of the system. Sometimes one needs kickass businesspeople with proven track records to rev up that chainsaw and put a little motivational fear into those unscrupulous who would otherwise continue to take advantage of their country…which in turn takes advantage of their fellow citizens.
People who do their jobs with honesty and integrity should not be afraid of listing their accomplishments.
Dr. Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd in Ghostbusters):
PWS
He also has the best line in the movie, spoke while in jail ….
‘You never studied.”
Having worked as a Federal contractor for over twenty years, I can’t remember a time when I DIDN’T have to write up a “status report” document of my work accomplishments of the week, every single week.
So to all you Federal Employees who being traumatized by having to do this exactly once, I say: BOO FUCKING HOO.
–Dwayne