I work GIS/IT for small county government. It’s Saturday. What did I do today? hmm worked for 3 hours on my dime, and walked my dogs.
What will I do tomorrow, Sunday? Pretty much the same thing. Might make chili too though.
“What did you do today” is an insult.
This totally deserves sympathy, though. No worker deserves to be treated like that. Federal employees are not predominantly sandbags. What Musk is doing is probably illegal. He and Trump are both asshats.
Yes there’s inefficiency in the government, as in every org, but that doesn’t mean it’s all rotten nor that staff deserve to be abused by dimwits who are basically malevolent children pulling the wings off flies.
Apart from the sympathy, the institutional loss of experience is going to be tragic.
That’s the thing that will prevent easily reversing this vandalism if trump & musk were to suddenly magically evaoprate. Even if the rest of the US political system promptly woke up as if from a bad dream, determined to restore things to the pre-trump status quo, they will find it extremely hard and expensive to do so.
Some inefficiency calls for more spending, not less. There are almost certainly improvements that can be made by introducing new technologies, particularly hardware and software. And if they were really concerned about government spending and deficits, they would be increasing the budget and staffing levels at the IRS, not reducing them. (Ask any corporate executive managing during a downturn if they’re making cuts to accounts receivable. They will almost certainly say no.)
Talking w/ my boss (with whom I have a quite good relationship), she said she could imagine us having increased “quotas.” I told her I’ve always been a producer. If they tell me to do more, I’ll likely do more - but neither of us should pretend that the quality won’t be lower. And another thing - I’m not gonna donate to the cause. No unpaid OT from this fella.
There is ZERO apparent effort to identify and fire the people who ought to be fired, or the folk who do the least.worst work. Or to identify inefficiencies. The SOLE aim seems to be to simply fire as many people as possible. With no thought as to how many people are needed to provide what level of service.
I always thought the best way to protect my job was to do a high amount of high quality work. Now, it is just keeping your head down and hoping to avoid getting hit. And counting down the months (approximately 34) to planned retirement. Each month that I don’t get fired or things don’t get so bad that I have to quit is another month closer to my planned exit date.
We are just going to have to become accustomed to a country in which we receive shitty public service from civil servants who don’t care.
Given the amount of errors, mistakes, and firing government employees who actually perform critical, irreplaceable functions, it seems like the efficiency spotlight out to be on DOGE first before all. They seem to be really terrible at their ostensible jobs, and when Elon isn’t glomming over Trump in the Oval Office or Cabinet meetings he seems to be spending most of his time on a stupid social media site or playing video games from Chinese servers somehow. Somebody ought to look into that.
Stranger
Yes. So Elon can post a graph showing “$X billions in savings” and Trump can say “and we need to pass that money along to our Wonderful Job Creators [the top 1%]”
The actual (as opposed to stated) DOGE ‘give us your five accomplishments’ requested-list functions:
That said, a handful of government workers will keep their jobs. To increase one’s chances of being chosen, I’d advise making sure your Five Accomplishments are full of phrases such as:
That’s the way to make yourself one of the Saved.
Assuming you can write that without being physically ill.
If Musk sent those emails to people in the intelligence agencies, someone should tell him that (unlike his boss) they’re not allowed to send classified information over an unclassified network.
I believe many agency heads (including Tulsi Gabbard) have advised their staff not to reply to this request, and that if there is any question about what you did last week, that would be handled internally, though the normal chain of command.
He has and they have. From the Musk Watch newsletter:
Musk’s gambit backfired. Numerous cabinet secretaries have explicitly informed their subordinates not to respond. FBI Director Kash Patel told his employees to “pause any responses” to the Musk email. Employees at the Departments of Justice, State, Defense, Energy, Health and Human Services (HHS), and Homeland Security were given similar instructions, as were employees at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Director of National Intelligence’s office. “Assume that what you write will be read by malign foreign actors and tailor your response accordingly,” warned an HHS memo advising employees to ignore Musk’s request.
Even sending unclassified material through unencrypted channels compromises security because just information about who is working on basic tasks at which site and with whom is itself sensitive information. Not that Elon cares because this is all about ‘efficiency’, and there is certainly nothing efficient about protecting sensitive information, so I guess it isn’t worth doing.
Stranger
As the Trump/Musk years advance, many will have need of antiemetic medications to treat nausea and vomiting. These can include:
(Thanks, Google AI-generated information!)
Here is my experience in seeing how government works, as someone who spent decades doing federal contracting. And this is not unique to government. However, I am not an expert in organizational change management.
The biggest improvements come in business process redesign, not technology. The effective application of technology I have seen is when it is part of a business process analysis and design. The worst way to apply technology is to automate existing inefficient processes, which is the easiest way to do it and what is often done. (“We have this paper form we fill out in triplicate, we want a screen that looks just like this.”)
IMLE these kinds of redesign do not result in the wholesale reduction in staff, but rather in marked improvements in productivity and throughput.
The ridiculous extreme is the pointy-haired boss who got email in the 1990s and so asked his secretary to print his emails so he could fax copies to his own boss.
What Musk is doing is not any of this. There is no analysis of where there is waste or inefficiency, other than picking a few projects that have funny titles. I have seen MBA students who could do a more thoughtful and effective job of this. He has an incredibly sophomoric approach.
Elon Musk’s objective is not efficiency or even cost savings; if it were, he would be more careful with his figures and more disciplined in his approach. Elon’s goal is to stir shit and revel in the outrage. He’s trolling, punctuated with dank memes and dad jokes, and Trump just gave him the cheat code to access the core game engine of the US government.
Stranger
Let’s not forget he’s trying to kneecap those parts of the government that are regulating his companies, and trying to bend those parts of the government that he wishes to contract with to his will.
This garden-variety corruption and self-dealing could bring him down, if news of it somehow penetrated the epistemic bubble that his followers inhabit.
This is his plan, no doubt
There is not a chance that his devotees will find offense in that. Indeed, most of them think it is further evidence of his purported ‘genius’.
Stranger
There are a lot more Musk fanboys than there should be, certainly, but they still make up a small fraction of the right. There’s a lot more people who think they like what he’s doing because they haven’t heard what he’s really doing, and retain a sufficiently dubious attitude toward a multibillionaire space enthusiast and electric-car booster to be receptive to the truth - if they should happen to hear it, which they themselves will go to great lengths to avoid. Cognitive dissonance, and all that.
I’ve seen it phrased as “you don’t know how to solve a problem with code if you don’t know how to solve it without code”.
A company I used to work for had a C-level exec who wanted a “submit a report about what you did last week” every week. The process went basically like:
The entire cycle took about eight months to a year to complete (with most of the time in phase 2). Never once did the content of the reports have any impact on anything.
I think there must be a management methodology book somewhere that starts with “have everyone send a report on what they did in the last week” that probably has many other steps, but no one gets past the first step. (Like software companies “going agile” which begins and ends with “having daily standups”).
At one point I used to have my direct reports send me a weekly email with significant accomplishments and plans for the following week. I wanted it to be a tool for them to ensure that whatever they were doing was actually in support of a goal, and that they were looking ahead and thinking strategically.
Then I realized that if I didn’t know what my own direct reports were doing every week, I wasn’t doing my job.
And there would be absolutely no point in having line staff submit a report like that to C-level execs.