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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«সবচেয়ে পুরাতন ‹পুরাতন 217 এর 201 – থেকে 217Any time I've ever gotten a new boss the first thing they've asked me is (a) what tasks do I do and (b) what issues are there that they should be attempting to fix.
The left act as if this is a gross infringement of privacy, whereas every person in the private sector sees it as a basic task of employment.
Musk in no way needs to make the people screaming about this happy. If you can't do this most basic of tasks, you deserve to be fired.
Ann Althouse said...
"When I worked in a law firm, I had to track all of my time."
What if when you were first told that this was required it was required with respect to the week that had already passed?"
Then I would have to reconstruct it based on emails, phone calls, documents, calendars and so forth.
I have had to do this during my careers when the timesheet system lost the data.
And Musk isn't asking for an accounting of a 40 hour week in 6 minute units.
He is asking someone who allegedly works a 5 day week for one item per day they achieved.
Some ideas are so stupid only an academic could support them. The argument that this is somehow on par with the labours of Hercules is one of them.
Bottoms up 🥃
Bottoms up 🥃
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.
************
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.
**********
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.
******************
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?"
*****************
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.
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