Musk says all federal employees need to explain their work — or be let go
Musk says all federal employees need to explain their work — or be let go
His post on X said employees will receive an email “shortly” requesting to “understand what they got done last week.”
All federal government employees will have to share what they’ve been working on in the last week or face dismissal, Elon Musk said Saturday.
Musk posted on X that employees will be receiving an email “shortly” requesting to “understand what they got done last week.” A lack of response, Musk said, “will be taken as a resignation.” It’s unclear what legal authority, if any, Musk is relying on.
This is basically the platonic ideal of the most incompetent manager/boss possible.
What, is Elon gonna personally read 3 million emails?
Is he gonna hire a team of contractors to go through them?
Will Elon or his team of broccoli boys even understand any of the technical or process specific terms people use?
This is an obvious farce, all it does as serve as the flimsiest way possible to at any point claim he can fire anyone for any reason as 'I am unsatisfied with your self directed performance evaluation'.
Beyond this all being completely illegal, of course.
... Hopefully, if we're lucky, Elon will have all these emails printed out, like when he decided to print out Twitter code for review, and he trips down the stairs with a bankers box or two of these emails, and breaks his fucking neck.
Feed the emails to grok, summerize, then fire people based off whatever it hallucinates.
Will Elon or his team of broccoli boys even understand any of the technical or process specific terms people use?
Ooooh malicious compliance idea:
Send the email and make it chock full of every acronym and industry terms you can think of. Make it as opaque as possible so only a technical expert can read it.
Include the entire dictionary in white single point font
And needlessly define the most obvious words while ignoring the tricky ones.
I wouldn't do that. The burden of the proof to let someone go isn't on the DOGE people. If they don't feel convinced in whatever very-brief time they spend looking at someone that the person needs to be there, I expect that the DOGE people are liable to put them on the chopping block.
I'd treat it as a job interview. The interviewee has to convince the interviewer that they should work there, or else they aren't going to be hired. Same thing here, just less-pleasant mood in the room.
If I were in the potentially-laid-off people's shoes, I'd lead with a pretty concise summary of the important stuff that happens because of me doing my job, since I bet that the DOGE crowd isn't spending a whole lot of time deeply looking at any of this.
It's the same exact tactic as used in Elonia's "polls" on Xitter...
Attempt to show "cover" or "support" for what he's going to do anyway regardless of outcome.
Simple theatrics.
🤦♀️🤷🫏🤡🖕🖕
A baby or two would probably break his fall.
he left one of his human shields on the stage.
It makes sense we’d move through “Office Space” territory on our way to “Idiocracy.”
Office Space was the first thing I thought of.
What time is your meeting with the Bobs?
A pile of fish guts on the TPS reports does not constitute a "lack of response", and is therefore not a fireable offense. Any wagers?
'office space' probably still lives....
in treasury department computers.
And then we're quickly onto Children of Men, and then The Road.
It turns out, he can say "not responding to this email is a formal resignation" until he's blue in the face, that doesn't make it so. Ignoring the part where it's not legal. He WILL be paying unemployment to all of them, and likely wrongful termination. Of course by "he" I mean "all of us" because it will be our tax dollars.
what an incompetent shitheel.
Well look, I already told you! I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to! I have people skills! I am good at dealing with people! Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?
Well just got that email just now. I know why it’s happening i just hate that our safety systems we have in place arent doing anything to stop this nonsense.
Also that email doesn't state anywhere about no response being considered a resignation. It's been sent on a Saturday night, and given just over 48 hours to respond, meaning many employees will be on RDO and unable to respond.
Sorry to hear that, they will undouptly run this trough an AI to decide. So game it the old fashioned way with all the buzzwords (and definitely none of the black list words) or modern prompt injection
"Fucked your mom. Sorry you had to find out like this."
"Spent some time with my kids."
Does this count Congressmen and Senators, too? How about Special Government Employees?
I don't think that Musk is doing this for whatever he's being directly paid. He may benefit indirectly in that reshaping the government in some ways might be favorable for his business or financial interests. But he's not in any kind of need of money. Anything that the government would pay him would be a rounding error on his other sources of wealth. Just no point.
kagis
https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-doge-paid-donald-trump-white-house-2032709
However, as previously reported by Newsweek, Musk is not receiving a salary for his role, according to White House filings. Musk has been classified as a "special government employee," a designation that allows individuals to work for the government on a temporary basis.
Yeah.
He's not going to even understand most of the responses he gets, so this is an exercise in futility. In some cases it would be like having a village idiot judge the Nobel prize candidates.
He and his goons don’t even understand how SQL works.
Or COBOL, apparently.
Could it be they didn't understand some fundamental information on how COBOL handles default date values? No, it must be the 150 year old vampires exploiting Social Security!
So his approach to reducing bureaucracy is having everyone document and explain what they do?
Fascist are oddly obsessed with paperwork. Reducing bureaucracy by increasing bureaucracy is part of the contradictions that fascism rely on.
I replaced the tremie pipes to address the side fumbling on my department's retro encabulator.
Replaced the tremie pipes with frampton valves in our encabulator's dint socket and got a 23% decrease in lateral frundling. Is yours the version 1.04a or 43?
Still on 1.04. I've been pestering my manager to upgrade to 1.04a for months now, but stuff moves slowly in the government. The day I no longer have to tighten the girdlesprings to synchronize the Magneto-reluctance fluctuation with the variance of the cardinal grammeters, I'll be a happy man.
Classy, rockin' the Retro Encabulator. Hoping to upgrade to the Turbo some time in the future?
I think it'll be tough to find the budget for the 300 new hires we'd need to operate it.
Remember, you don't have to to work for the government to reply to hr@opm.gov
Just saying...
It's quite easy for a Mailserver to ignore external mails
Don't email servers still have to check who is sending an email to ignore it? You could theoretically DDoS them by accident i would think.
I think you underestimate how many individual mailservers there are in the US government. I know of an example where legitimate mail from one branch of the military was sent to the spam folder of another branch of the military.
On the other hand, filtering out specific servers like gmail or proton mail sounds incredibly easy.
Perhaps Tesla, SpaceX, X, and all of his other companies should send him the same email. No way he is getting anything done as their CEO while he is ripping and tearing through the federal government.
lots of federal workers don't work a normal schedule or get government email at home. they won't even know about this til its deadline is past. not that that's the only problem with this.
I sincerely hope this man goes to prison
In my opinion that's actually only one of two possible outcomes, knowing the personalities and philosophies of those in power.
He either becomes de-facto leader of the US or he pisses off Trump and other Money and goes to jail. The minute Elon loses support from the right he crashes and burns spectacularly. Pisses off Trump too much and its game over for him.
I assure you that even if this government falls there will somehow be no evidence that he did anything, let alone anything illegal. There will be no paperwork with his name or signature. Regardless of the pile of human garbage that is this administration, the US is completely unable to hold billionaires accountable for literally anything.
If you're afraid of their hollow scare tactics, just send a reply that says, "Communication received. Continuing work according to my job role as typical".
Remember that they can't legally justify these firings and likely won't pay you severance. This is a weak intimidation tactic, this is when the other guy in the online game starts by telling you to forfeit before the gave has started. Make them fire you so you can collect unemployment and have standing to sue (if the world doesn't collapse before next administration).
This is partially their insurance policy - same playbook as always, just accelerated. Like how trump 1 admin planned for tax cuts for wealthy to be paid by the poor when next person would be in office. Now they are just breaking everything and setting up grounds for historically unprecedented class action lawsuits for potential next person. If a decent person somehow did reclaim the presidency in '28, they'd be forced to acknowledge and allow the illegal firing, pay trillions in back pay and penalty restitution.
A reasonable judge would hold these billionaires liable to their last
pennynickel
My company of 60 people has us do this and the responses don't get read. I'm sure 90% of people use GPT to give their responses anyway.
Have fun with that Muskrat
Can he explain his work without sunglasses this time?
I wish Musk's head would let go of his body
His head would just grow a new body like the monster from The Thing
Over under on 1000+ people being fired for being on vacation and not replying within the deadline?
now everyone is getting messages to not do it. and calls.
Let's start with you, bub.
Remember when Trump got rid of the White House pandemic office?
Because Trump was a great business man who knew how to save money.
Copy job posting. Paste into email body. Send.
He sent this even to contractors. There is no authority to hire and fire contractors. This is ludicrous, and also highly illegal for federal civil servants. I plan on reporting this to the security office as spam immediately Monday morning.
Judging from the article, my suspicion is they are going to use the data to train AI, to eventually replace human workers. It is not to justify one's self to not be fired, it is to allow the AI to replace them.
More fuel for the inevitable lawsuits from all the people working for the largest non-profit org in the world. Hope they can make him personally responsible.
Musk : Explain your work.
Employee : You gave me this work.
Musk : Fired.
This must be one of the most knob pics of this guy I have seen to date.
Dear fElon,
After the daily struggle to keep this government running despite efforts to the contrary and repeated unmitigated budgetary damage, I currently lack the crayons and the spare time to properly school you on a description of my job; even at a level so high you could use it as a space elevator.
Please let me know if that's your goal, as we could realize a cost-savings for NASA. Otherwise, I can recommend some intro courses on forecasting and management that could get you a little more up to speed, and we can arrange a time to meet and talk afterwards.
Have a super day.
-Me
Hey Musk you asshat, stop wasting all of our government’s time asking federal workers what they did last week! We all know what you did, mass terminations and backpedaling, because you and “DOGE” are INCOMPETENT.
——— The good news is that all of us will die someday. It’s a small consolation but it’s what helps me smile today.
Explain to me, Orange Man. What value do you bring to the table?
He doesn't know what his employees do? Why is he in a position of power if he doesn't know anything about federal employees work. Musk proves himself to be more and more incompetent each and every day
Have him justify his existence first
Oh, so that’s how he’s trying to run the country like a business! Sell everything off, and then move to a different one.
I also seriously doubt he’s smart enough to understand what many employees, such as scientists and engineers, actually do.
Unelected, immigrant traitor, in the process of selling your future.
To be clear, I have no problem with immigrants, but many of his conservative “constituents” do!
Can you imagine working for this guy. I supervise a small team and would never micromanage this way without a really good reason for it. Who the fuck has time for this.
No point in replying, odds are they aren't going to read all of those emails anyway. Or if you do, don't put much effort into it.
If they want to clean out a department, a well worded email isn't going to be what saves your job.
Even if you are one of the ones not fired, it would be debatable if working there after the dust settles would be better than the bread line.
It's like watching Office Space happen in real time.
I'd send them the longest fucking email back detailing everything in painful detail of what I did last week. 99% being straight up fluff.
Have an LLM write an incredibly long email using filler and buzzwords to explain a few simple things
lol
Wait. Musk has access to every address of these workers. Many have mortgages. Is this just a play to have the bank take their homes and then they are auctioned for cheap to Musk et al?
[Scene: The Oval Office. JD Vance, the Vice President of the United States, is seated at his desk. Pete Davidson, a reporter, enters the room with a notebook and recorder.]
Pete Davidson: So, Mr. Vice President, I've been looking into your role here in the White House. Can you tell me what you do?
JD Vance: [smirking] Well, let me tell you. I deal with the goddamn politicians so the lawyers don't have to! I have people skills... for people who are trying to get things done!
Pete Davidson: But... but isn't your job more about policy and-
JD Vance: [interrupting] Policy, schmolicy! The people want me to deal with the people, not just talk about them. And let's be real, I'm good at dealing with people. I've got charisma, I've got charm, and I've got a Twitter account that can turn anything into a meme!
Pete Davidson: [skeptical] Uh-huh... And what exactly do you mean by "dealing with the people"?
JD Vance: [leaning forward] I mean, I'm like a social media influencer for the Trump administration. I get to say whatever I want and watch it blow up on Twitter. It's like having my own reality TV show! The engineers are just there to document everything so everyone knows I'm not a total disaster.
Pete Davidson: [taken aback] Uh... okay, got it...
JD Vance: [grinning] And can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people who can't see the genius of my role?!