The Elon Musk email fiasco keeps getting weirder and weirder. After a dozen agencies advised their workers not to respond to Musk's email demanding that they justify their jobs, the White House ultimately backed them up:
On Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt reiterated to reporters that Cabinet secretaries have discretion over whether their employees need to answer Musk’s email..... “The president defers to his Cabinet secretaries, who he’s obviously entrusted to pursue the guidance relative to their specific workforce,” Leavitt said.
But it was too late. Musk had already gone ballistic:
The email request was utterly trivial, as the standard for passing the test was to type some words and press send!
Yet so many failed even that inane test, urged on in some cases by their managers.
Have you ever witnessed such INCOMPETENCE and CONTEMPT for how YOUR TAXES are… https://t.co/QjSmY4ezpg
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 24, 2025
Musk really doesn't get it. Of course it's a trivial email to answer. Of course there's nothing inherently wrong with asking employees to provide progress reports. But only if you're going to read them. By contrast, a couple of million reports dumped into the HR.gov mailbox are obviously just pointless makework, not anything actually useful. It's the very opposite of efficient.
And yet, Musk, remarkably, plans to do it all over again:
Subject to the discretion of the President, they will be given another chance.
Failure to respond a second time will result in termination. https://t.co/04xzgScXfj
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 25, 2025
Hoo boy. Talk about not reading the room. Even Donald Trump is likely to get annoyed by Musk's insistence on refighting this stupid battle. Musk needs to understand that sometimes you need to just take the L and move on.
Why is Matt Walsh controlling the civil service today?
Why are Republicans okay with this?
It's gross. It's massive misinformation and abuse of power. Power neither of those guys should have.
They're ok with this because Walsh represents fairly mainstream Republican values. He's not particularly extreme by their view and is part of the Daily Wire. That, along with Turning Point, are really the intellectual heft of the public facing Republican movement. Walsh, Shapiro, Johnson, and Kirk are the main faces that of the online Republicans, while Cooper takes the younger ones in. The entire Republican movement if focused on bringing forth an authoritarian government, why would they have any shame about who is pushing that forward?
There's actually a whole lot wrong with Musk's email-me-updates scheme that doesn't have anything to do with "whether [he'll] actually read it."
Musk isn't mad because. Musk's mad because that email was another tool with which to bludgeon and frighten the federal workforce into submission. It is not a legitimate management technique.
It is NOT normal for OPM to ask this of federal employees outside of the OPM chain of command. Don't sanewash it.
+1
As far as Trump is concerned, Musk role is to harass federal workers, to make them more cooperative with the Trumpists at the top of the departments.
+2
The email is a contemptuous dominance move, meant to instill fear and identify and remove anyone with any self respect.
That and Musk is not Senate appointed so federal workers do not report to him.
This is straight out of a move, that behavior like this doesn't provide such revulsion shows how soul sick our nation is. Trump's approval barely budges.
According to 538, Trump's approval is now statistically indistinguishable from his disapproval.
I'm constantly amazed and distressed that his approval is as high as it is.
I’m not. A lot of Republicans think that the country is far too lax and needs a boot to the ass. Enough to keep those poll numbers up.
Remember that we are immersed in this cluster, for the average American nothing has changed except the price of eggs.
Trump is ok with it because it pits Musk against the cabinet and results in Drama. Trump is running a TV show.
+1
+10
1) Goes outside the chain of command.
2) Comes from someone who's hellbent on destroying your workplace.
Gee...who wouldn't be excited to respond to something like that???
Yes, this.
Federal workers already got two "do you have a pulse?" emails from OPM when they were setting up the system. It's not their fault that DOGE was too stupid to realize that out-of-office replies weren't the same as a real reply.
And yeah it's stressful to be told "justify your job to an anonymous person at an external email whose stated purpose is to find a reason to fire you" with no guidance about how detailed a response is needed or how that info will be used. Not to mention that some employees will have job descriptions that are classified.
Elon Musk is that guy at the bar that spends all night leering at women and invading their personal space and then says "I was just asking them out for coffee." when called on it.
I had assumed all along that any replies would be fed into an AI, and now there are reports; supposedly the AI will determine from the bullet points whether the respondent’s job is mission-critical.
A terminated USAID worker. This is a good look at what is happening to people in the federal workforce. We need more stories like this on TV and in media.
Fired federal employees are telling their stories—no deep state, just career public servants tossed aside.
DOGE’s mass firings aren’t about efficiency—they’re gutting expertise, wrecking lives, and calling it “reform.”
https://bsky.app/profile/cwebbonline.com/post/3lj27vjnvx22h
Chyron: 21 Doge workers resign in protest. Even Doge hires don't want what's happening.
The twenty-one were employed at the US Digital Service, before that was merged with the misleadingly named ‘DOGE’.
O/T but can't resist: Trump Gaza
https://x.com/atrupar/status/1894616074861130182
Why use Xitter? You like Musk?
https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com
Except now I have to go to xitter to figure out which one...
This one? https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3lj2mhga6kk2a
Besides how utterly lunatic it is, he has made it very clear that he wants to permanently remove the Palestinians from Gaza and make it a resort for rich people, not a paradise for the people who currently live there.
The rich people who vacation on the beach in Gaza will deserve the fate that awaits them. It won't be paradise. Culling the herd is what they call it, right?
Who would invest in a Gaza resort knowing that it will be a target for drones, missiles and suicide bombers every day? Who would visit such a resort?
Have you not seen the videos and selfies from idiots who have to post themselves doing some lunatic thing or another.
In the fever dreams of Trump and his fans there will be no drones or suicide bombers because everyone will be happy worshipping golden statues of Trump while children carry golden balloons shaped in Trump’s image. Meanwhile rich people will dance with harem girls while money showers on them. A paradise brought about by The Leader’s magnificent vision.
And I’m sure it’s believed by Trump’s cult and Trump believes it too, at least in the way a time share salesman believes what he is saying to his gullible marks.
"In the fever dreams of Trump and.."
I don't believe that. Trump wants to "strong", by which means suppressing the poulation. In his wet dreams he reproduces Tiananmen Square in the US (and then is complimented about it by Putin).
The image in the fantasy AI promo has far greater reality for trump than anything that might happen in what the rest of us foolishly consider our mutual "real life."
Trump's Gazan paradise has bearded women belly dancing in it. I guess the gender binary only applies on this side of the Atlantic.
Hard to know what the Musk-Trump dynamic is like and that's the only room that Musk needs to be reading.
Does Donald play the subservient toady to Musk like he does with Putin? Maybe. And if so, Musk will be able to get away with a lot more.
The media exchange in the oval office that featured Musk and his kid dominating the scene while scowling, confused, old man Donald sat in the corner withering away, probably told us how this relationship works. Maybe
Until you see Musk meddling in the operation of law-enforcement agencies, it is obvious that Trump calls the shots.
Musk does the damage in other agencies, which is useful for Trump because it is not popular.
So Musk is the useful idiot for the useful idiot?
Trump is not a "useful idiot". He is a dangerous demagogue skilled in bamboozling people who is quite far on the way to destroying democracy in the US.
Making him Putin's useful idiot.
That is infantile.
https://open.substack.com/pub/michaeldsellers/p/a-deeper-look-at-claims-by-kgb-officer?r=4xr555&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
Just sayin'.
Trump destroying democracy in the US is:
1) Bad for you.
2) Bad for the people around you.
3) Bad for the town/city you live in.
4) Bad for your state.
5) Bad for the US.
6) Bad for the rest of humanity.
7) Bad for the biosphere of earth.
These are the important things.
It will also please Putin. But that is a minor detail, and the fact that this is what you concentrate on is infantile.
No, thats pretty clearly not obvious.
People in subservient roles are often able to make decisions and exert power in certain areas over certain people.
Who's worse, the people who didnt respond to an inane email or the emotionally stunted man child who sent it to begin with? For fucks sake Musks bullshit has to stop. His ego is worse than Trumps.
The worst person found someone still worse.
+1
"Have you ever witnessed such INCOMPETENCE..." Every damned day since inauguration when you were installed as defacto POTUS.
+100!
(12 minutes per employee) x ($50 / hour) x 2,000,000 employees = $20,000,000.
Clearly money better spent on a couple of presidential golf trips.
12 minutes is a vast underestimate. It would take me 12 minutes to put together a list for my boss, who knows what I'm actually working on and simply wants an update. But it would take significantly longer for this kind of thing: timetalking to coworkers to see if they got the same thing, time asking boss what I should do, lots of time trying to figure out what the AI might want to see in order to avoid being randomly fired, time trying to write and rewrite so that someone who has zero clue about my job has a hope of understanding what I'm talking about. And then there us the time spent complaining with coworkers about it and the time spent debating if you should just quit now.
Minimum of one hour per employee, but easily two.
Plus all the time supervisors had to spend talking to their subordinates about it. Plus the time leadership spent writing up the "guidance" emails that were sent out. Plus the time they spent fielding questions from concerned staff.
Under normal circumstances, I could have done this in less than 12 minutes.
But these aren't normal circumstances. I would have only sent something after giving it lots of thought, consulting with my supervisors, and then spending time carefully crafting each bullet point.
"Subject to the discretion of the President..." Which one? You or the dunce that was actually elected?
Musk himself even calls it an “inane test” in that very tweet!
Right -- he admits it's a completely pointless waste of time. It's just a stupid flex to intimidate federal workers to see if they comply. Which is why they are fully within their rights to tell him to fuck off.
How far down do you have to go before you're citing Matt Walsh?
very very very far
and disappointed drum chose to post those tweets
Also? *It's not trivial.* Trivial would have been "respond to this email with a few random words and hit send, just to prove you received and read it," then that's trivial.
The email he actually sent, though, was "explain why I shouldn't fire you, and make it good." That's an email that causes considerable stress to the recipient just on reading it (a result that these guys want, and loudly proclaim in other venues) and which, if you take the threat seriously, will require a lot of work to answer.
"Even Donald Trump is likely to get annoyed by Musk's insistence on refighting this stupid battle."
I'm not sure what makes you say that.
Right? Trump loves drama, he feeds on it. He knows it keeps audiences tuning in every week.
And distracts from the main action in the DOJ, FBI etc.
What grants Musk any authority to demand anything from a government worker? Trump has said he isn't the leader of DOGE so why doesn't everybody continue to ignore the overheated prick?
It's absurd, isn't it? There is no legal basis for it. In no sane world would any of this be happening. And of the many possible sane worlds, this apparently is not one of them.
This is basically what I came here to say, too. As you say, Musk is doubly not in a position to do this -- dogie has zero personnel authority, and he doesn't even run it anyway (and it's particularly good black humor that when forced to name the person who supposedly does run dogie, it's somebody on vacation in Mexico who had no idea they were going to say it was her.)
KD writes "Of course there's nothing inherently wrong with asking employees to provide progress reports. But only if you're going to read them."
I say the "but" is, but only if you're entitled to *request* them. Where is Musk's authority to request them? With people who have such withering contempt for rules, you dig in on the rules. Every comma, every word.
At a key point in Babylon 5, Sheridan discusses with a higher officer how to respond to a planetary coup. What he's told sets the stage for all that follows: "Respect the chain of command."
On second thought I think Sheridan might have been discussing how to respond to Psy Corps giving him orders, or something close to that. Been so long since I've seen it that I don't recall the specific setup, but it doesn't affect the point.
Why is Musk doing this? Two words: massive ego. That, coupled with a pathological antipathy toward workers, is all you need to know.
What I did last week:
* Researched the org structure and determined that Mr Musk appears nowhere in the chain of command
* Confirmed with my actual management that this inane demand is irrelevant and need not be obeyed
* Verified that recent court cases have confirmed these interpretations
* Did my job, not that Mr Musk or his mouseketeer gang have the slightest idea of what that is
* Typed out a few effin' words. See 'em? They're right here.
Happy now, Mr Megalomuskiac?
+1
"the standard for passing the test was to type some words and press send"
Was not presented as such. I mean, why bother claiming the mandate was to type words, when typing random letters achieves the same result (that the government employee is alive). In fact, you don't even need to type letters. Simply hitting [REPLY] [SEND] is enough.
Trump: “It’s somewhat voluntary, but it’s also, if you don’t answer, I guess you get fired,” the president said.
There's more good comedy here. When Musk initially started hacktracking (sic), he pivoted to this just being a pulse check, to see if anyone actually there and not a phantom, which Trump called "genius". But is it?
First, any vaguely experienced IT person knows that an email activity report can be queried in seconds, and formatted for delivery in minutes, so this could be gathered across agencies in a matter of days, maybe a week or two.
Second, if there is fraud and people not actually in the jobs we think, an email pulse check isn't likely going to ferret it out, since those perpetuating the fraud can simply reply to the email.
Third, the email was sent out late Saturday afternoon, when people are off and Musk probably buzzed, so end-of-day deadline Monday makes absolutely no sense for either scope (firing people or pulse check), except to someone who doesn't respect work-life balance like Musk (putting aside people who are out sick, on vacation, etc.).
This stupidity is kind of similar to loudly pronouncing massive Social Security fraud because 100+ year old people supposedly found in the database, which is meaningless if you don't check to see if they are getting actual payments, and then if those payments are being deposited (if a physical check), or if being cashed in the case of automatic direct deposit (and putting aside the other stupidity about those database records not likely being suspect in the least).
Beyond that there is the reality that a not insignificant fraction of workers would not be available to respond to the email. Presuming that folks on vacation might not be checking emails and/or under no obligation to respond, it's likely that somewhere between 3 and 4% of the recipients wouldn't respond even if you had complete responses from all on-the-job folks. (the percentage is higher if you consider that some proportion of the workforce is, at any given time, out sick, fielding family emergencies, etc.)
That's on top of the also not insignificant number of federal employees who will be slow in responding to emails because they are in court, or working undercover, or busy with an emergency response, or in the field without email access, etc.
So, even if Musk wanted to use this as a way of figuring out if there were some number of employees not working, it would still be a fail, because you'd have tens of thousands of null responses that you'd have to then go and investigate and sort out to figure whether any of those were legit or not.
And all that would do is let you know (maybe) if there were excess federal email addresses, which I guess is an interesting bit of data, but saves essentially no money, because there is no reason to think that just because there is a j.doe@irs.gov email without a flesh-and-blood J. Doe recipient that there is some fraudulent J. Doe collecting a paycheck.
Folks on vacay may well have set up auto-responders, so they'd register as "alive." If that was all that was required.
He guesses? Doesn't he know? He's the president! lol. It really is ridiculous, his whole administration.
Remember? "I don't take responsibility for anything."
That needs to be carved on his headstone/tomb and in vast golden letters over the entrance to his "presidential library."
* I spent 120 minutes reading the humorous Reddit thread of what people would have put down on their list, you know, so that I would know where to start
* Took an extra hour off to get a massage and meditate on what tasks I completed (I don't make lists of things I finished, I just do them -- can you imagine the amount of time I'd be wasting documenting every last thing I did?)
* I blocked out 60 minutes to make this list
* I had a friend proofread the list and made corrections
* I did 15 of 20 tasks
* The remaining 5 tasks that were not completed the last 5 working days was because I had to do research, review, and compile this list
* I completed this special task ahead of schedule and submitted it a half-day early
Elmo retweeting bigot and hate merchant Matt Walsh is kind of a tell here.
"Of course there's nothing inherently wrong with asking employees to provide progress reports. But only if you're going to read them."
Oh ,they'll be read al right.... by AI, from which we can of course expect informed, well-reasoned analyses of which employees are doing something worthwhile. /s
Musk is so livid that so many folks are not willing to contribute to training his AI product.
Classic good cop bad cop. I think the whole point is to make it uncomfortable to work in the federal bureaucracy to cause a mass exodus of the skilled, knowledgeable, self respecting and competent employees. Ultimately to cause a mass privatization of the government as they break all these departments.
He's on a lot of drugs.
"By contrast, a couple of million reports dumped into the HR.gov mailbox are obviously just pointless makework, not anything actually useful."
Yeah, but wait until he unleashes xAI on them.