Ugh. My draft of this post has been sitting in an open tab for 6 hours!
Let's move on to a more recent article on the subject: "Government agencies give conflicting guidance on Musk email/An email sent to 2.3 million workers asking them to outline their work last week is leading to confusion and differing instructions across the government" (WaPo).
Raising the stakes, Musk warned in a post on X that any employee who failed to respond would be treated as having resigned. But the email sent to workers made no mention of this possible consequence, which lawyers said would be illegal....
The email hit inboxes Saturday, when federal law bars some employees from working outside of their assigned shifts. Some federal workers were on leave — such as sick leave, parental leave or paid administrative leave imposed by the Trump administration — and unable to access their emails. Others, in the Defense Department, were on duty tours in remote locations, like jungles, without access to computers....
Experts said the email may be asking some recipients to violate federal laws, noting that employees at some agencies cannot disclose information about their work to third parties without explicit authorization. The request proved especially concerning for those who work in intelligence roles....
In email Saturday from FBI Director Kash Patel, for instance, said, “the FBI, through the Office of the Director, is in charge of all of our review processes and will conduct reviews in accordance with FBI procedures,” according to a message obtained by The Post.
Other agencies soon followed suit. The State Department “will respond on behalf of the Department,” read a message from Ambassador Tibor P. Nagy obtained by The Post. “No employee is obligated to report their activities outside of their Department chain of command.”...
“Elon Musk is traumatizing hardworking federal employees, their children and families,” [House Minority Leader Hakeem] Jeffries said. “He has no legal authority to make his latest demands.”
Musk needs to build trust. He can't go on instinct alone, and he can't treat the entire government as a trial-and-error experiment. No matter how much his fans enthuse about the method of moving fast and breaking things, he will fail if he doesn't inspire confidence. He's willing to throw ordinary workers into a panic. Does he enjoy the suffering of low-power employees? What kind of person are we dealing with here?
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What Fred Drinkwater said. Also: I worked 15 years in the USPS and 35 years in private sector. If I wasn't required to fill in such a form, you can bet your life I had it in my head in case I was asked verbally or via email. And Althouse's concern about "last week" is trivial --- that would be the easiest one to fill out. If you cannot list 5 things you got accomplished in the past week, even if your job is monotonous, you are failing. And Mark has never worked in the private sector if he espouses that such a list would never be demanded (except by HR). I was off work today and I could easily give you ten things I accomplished today.
And from my postal days:
Letter Carrier
Mon: Called in sick after Sunday night football
Tues: Filled out a request for 2 hours OT due to mail backed up from my route being pieced out on Monday.
Wed: Stole some soap samples
Thurs: Didn't steal soap samples; threw the cards accompanying them in the storm sewer
Fri: Begin my rotating long weekend off.
It seems that EPAP reporting has been a part of government employment forever. But how does one interpret the standards as being standard for all employees when there are definite subjective differences in how each employee is rated? For instance, the standards are measured by how the employee records their actual performance. But sometimes the manager records the performance and those numbers are not able to be seen by the employee so some employees overstate their performance giving them the advantage when there is no system in place to validate how the standards are recorded.
So Elmo has to do a little work in order to get worthwhile information before even performing individual evaluation. So as usual Musk lies.
"gadfly said...
So Elmo has to do a little work in order to get worthwhile information before even performing individual evaluation. So as usual Musk lies."
As usual in the rush to judgement you overlook the obvious.
A failure to respond is itself a VERY useful piece of information that requires very little effort from DOGE. Non respondees gives a prima facie list of fake employees.
Mark said...
Private industry would never treat their employees this way, as decades of personal experience have shown me. There are best practices for HR, this ain't it.
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So...you've personally worked in millions of different jobs in private industry, so you KNOW how they all treat their employees? ?????
And where did you learn that HR drives the decisions regarding downsizing?
SNORT
Sure, fire those people. They likely have civil service protections and this will actually cost MORE.
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Mark, you poor booby: Those civil service "protections" do not "protect" anyone working for the President in the Executive Branch---and they ALL do--- from being terminated as redundant, incompetent or inefficient.
Your "protections" may apply to a GS-15 firing a GS-7, but not to THE MAN himself. HE is "the Executive" of our Constitution.
Patel, Gabbard, Hegseth said fuk that dont answer nothing plus where does that nitwit think gonna get results from 100 of thousand of workers. Too many ALDI egg eaters up in here.... :)
RCOCEAN II said...
Again, a lot of this hatred of Federal workers is just envy. Some peeps had their chance, but decided to work in private industry because they wanted the big paycheck and were willing to take risks. And it didn't work out for them. Hence, the bitter view of Fed workers.
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SNORT. Yeah, everyone in the private sector wishes he had chosen to be a do-nothing chair-moistener sitting at home.
Yeah, EVERYONE who chose to take risks that didnb't work out is bitter and wishes ill on those who chose a life of indolence.
SNORT
Anyone who has worked as a "line manager" knows he/she must meet the goals the organization has set for himself and the people he supervises.
Periodic progress reports are SOP.
Group employees provide the data to support those reports, including forecasts regarding attainment of the group's goals.
A line manager who doesn't meet his own or his group's goals doesn't last long in the corporate world.
In Sales, it's called "not making your numbers." That's the Kiss of Death.
effinayright said...
"What if when you were first told that this was required it was required with respect to the week that had already passed?"
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I dunno...I meight look at the Job Description I was hired to fill, and compare it with what I had been doing.
Reasonable, one would think.
I got through some, maybe a quarter or so, of the comments.
I could look back at dates of reports and P.O.s and RFPs and such from twenty years ago, and regenerate a week's worth of my tasks. From my follow-on job, I'd have a harder time - it was in the dot.com era in a dot.com company and I was doing whatever had to be done. But I think I could make my case. And from my next job, I could look at the school schedule (I was a preschool director) and list what I would have been doing at that time.
And since moving to Texas, when I've been a homemaker, I suppose, I can still list at least five useful things I've done each week to keep the home fires burning.
If I look back past my environmental project management job, the first mentioned, I was in government work. And then it gets harder. I was an intern, and I spent a whole school year drawing a line around "oil and gas resources" at an arbitrary distance from the known fields' boundaries. There was no science behind it. The was no reason for the project. But that's what they gave me to do, for a full school year. Take every 7.5 minute quad in California, draw a big red line around known oil and gas reserves, and then draw a thinner black line at an arbitrary distance from those to indicate "resources."
While working for DoD as a Contracting Specialist/Officer and in Test and Evaluation as a Test (Project) Officer, we had spreadsheets for the contracting supervisors, and briefing slides in T&E that had to be updated weekly. If you did not update them by the required time, your supervisor or their supervisor was at your desk, wanting to know what you were doing that was so important that you didn't have time to update. In T&E, we also had "Knee Boards" and four or six panel slides that were updated weekly or daily, depending on the project. In T&E, we had weekly sessions, formal and informal, where the Integrated Product Team met to discuss trends, issues, hot buttons, etc. We'd brief our Directors if we thought there could be anything that came up at their level that could affect or surprise them at the weekly Friday afternoon meeting. (In T&E we also had the Friday bull session where we'd have a beer or soda and informally shot the shit. These sessions were off the record, and the Col and his Chiefs often joined us. When I took a supervisory position with the Forest Service and asked where the spreadsheet trackers were, the employees had no idea what I was talking about, and when I told them I was creating them, they wailed like beat mules. When I started the weekly update meetings, they were incredulous that I wanted to know what they were doing and the status of their buys. When I set timelines for them to contact the customer after getting assigned a purchase, they deeply resented my intrusions. One of my Grants and Agreements person went so far as to forge an email to demonstrate she was complying with the timelines. When she was confronted, she admitted she forged it - in writing, but claimed it was because I put too much pressure on her and she filed the first of several hostile work place grievances. It was like pulling teeth to give her formal punishment, and my supervisor changed her performance rating to a higher rating. I ended up retiring early after being the acting Deputy for Acquisitions and working with the clowns at the Regional Office. Were there hard workers at the FS? Yes, but those 20-40% of the individuals did the majority of the work. Another 20% were OK, and the rest were dregs. Me and my wife were both Civil Service. At DoD, we lived through two RIFs and two reorganizations. I was forced out of T&E and back into contracting; later my wife's division was eliminated and she had to find a new job. She went from a GS14 Division Chief to a GS12 low level thing in a civilian agency. I have friends affected by DOGE and I feel their pain. But life's a bitch, embrace the suck and move on.
It's not hard. Here's what I did: 20 therapy appointments generating around $4000 in revenue for my employer. I also did payroll for my own business, which turned over $10k last week. Only two bullet points, but I think that ought to be sufficient?
What did you do this week, commie? Elon wants to know.
Last job I had one duty was to run an occasional check of 30k computers on our network. It was a simple process - in the DOS command line you type 'ping ' and wait for the response. If the system was on-line, I'd get a return back. If not, the response was it didn't respond. If it'd been off too long, the network DNS would say the machine name couldn't be found and it'd been dropped from the domain. And it was a pain to add them again, so we usually queried the folks who'd been offline a week or two so they didn't drop off.
Dull, eh? And it'd take a long time to do 30,000 systems like that...
So I wrote a little script. And it took about 5 minutes to chew through the list, sorting the results into three columns in a spreadsheet.
Musk is doing the equivalent of a ping test on these people. If there's no answer, likely an email will be sent to their bosses to find out why.
"I think we are beginning to see the first cracks in Althouse's unquestioning support of the Trump Administration's behavior over the last month."
What a way to win friends.
As Musk tweeted on 02/22:
To be clear, the bar is very low here.
An email with some bullet points that make any sense at all is acceptable!
Should take less than 5 mins to write.
"What a way to win friends"
As is winning friends, or convincing people of the correctness of his arguments, were ever anywhere on Freder's list of goals.
As IF...
I see that most of the comments miss the point. The issue here is not that federal employees have to report what they did at work last week but who they have to send the report to.
I do object in principle to the urgent email. If someone sends me an email marked “high importance” and I open it and it is not of high importance, I deal with it after I have dealt with all of my other emails. If it’s urgent, call me don’t email me.
Oh, the urgent email came from the special assistant to the boss’s boss’s boss’s boss? We know all about that asshole in the private sector.
Sorry, boss, you should have called me to tell me I had an overriding project that required my immediate attention. And I will tell them that you didn’t call at my exit interview. Obviously, you failed to supervise my work.
It is much easier to describe 5 things you got done the week prior than to list 5 things that you will be getting done this coming week. It's called "improving"
Good thing you work in the private sector, huh, lefty. It just so happens though that the people being asked to justify their week work for the taxpayer, me. I don't know about you but I certainly want to know who has been contributing and who has been coasting. I don't know. Maybe you like paying taxes.
"As Musk tweeted on 02/22:"
He could have added one more line:
"And you're getting paid to do it."
I've never directly worked for the feds, but I have worked for about a dozen federal grant programs, often as the point person for grants paperwork. Although there were some good workers and good tasks achieved, the vast majority of the grant recipients were either outright crooks or incompetents, and the vast majority of the tasks were a waste of taxpayer money, or worse than a waste. I had one boss who was simply outright stealing from several grants simultaneously. His behavior was well-known. He told me to cook the books when reporting time came around. Instead, I reported him to his superior, who laughed hilariously and told me a white female could not report a black male boss for theft of funds in the VISTA program. I wrote to his superior and received no response, but they did transfer me. He also continued receiving the $11,000 a year he received for supposedly supervising me, while the agency that took me and my work in didn't receive extra funds for my supervision. Unsurprisingly, they were more dedicated, but a lot of what we did was nonsense, and several employees couldn't function at all -- their jobs were basically welfare being given out to admittedly traumatized refugees. As someone who frequently organized coalitions, I also got to know the work of more than 100 organizations that received some or a whole lot of federal funds. Almost all of it was politically biased leftist agitprop. Tax rules were flagrantly ignored; illicit lobbying and leftist organizing on the clock was routine; money poured into parties and pockets and staging protests and disappearing electronics. AIDS and job training programs were the worst.
Turns out AI is going to evaluate the responses.
Fired by AI?
Bullshitting AI eliminated bullshiting your boss.
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