Tina Smith, one of our Minnesota senators, has announced that she won’t be running for another term, unfortunately. Or is that good? Can we get some young progressive DFL radical to fill her position? But as she enters the final leg of her term, she’s fighting back.
@SenTinaSmith: This is the ultimate dick boss move from Musk – except he isn’t even the boss, he’s just a dick.
[Musk orders all federal employees to respond to an email]
@SenTinaSmith: I bet a lot of people had an experience like this with a bad boss — there’s an email in your inbox on Saturday night saying, “Prove to me your worthiness by Monday or else.”
I’m on the side of the workers, not the billionaire asshole bosses.
Bravo! Keep resisting!
This is an easy one to fight, at least. The order from Elon Musk is an ultimatum, sent out by someone with no official authority. It’s an incredibly stupid email.
With the subject line
What did you do last week?the email demanded that every recipientreply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager.It then reassuringly instructed employees,do not send [emphasis Musk’s, I mean OPM’s, or whatever] any classified information, links, or attachmentsand finished with a deadline ofthis Monday at 11:59pmESTwhich was for some very phishy reason hyperlinked.
I am not averse to accountability — I just got an email from my division chair informing me that it’ll be time form my yearly review of what I’ve been up to, and that’s fine. I expect my local administrator to want to be aware of all faculty activity, and to file away that information as a record of my responsibilities. But she has the authority and responsibility (and, by the way, was elected by the faculty to perform that role). Anyone could send me an email demanding that I list what I did last week, but I get to laugh and click delete.
But this…this is madness. The Department of Government Efficiency
thinks the way to enhance that efficiency is to demand that all employees file a list of what they did last week to some random email address? Last week…are they going to make this part of the weekly routine? What are they going to do with it? And just five?
OK, I’m not a federal employee, but here’s my list:
- Fed the spiders
- Cleaned the spider cages
- Fed the spiders again
- Turned over the mealworm substrate
- Repaired some spider silk frames
Those are probably the least significant, least time-consuming tasks I did last week, so I can fulfill the letter of the request while not informing them of anything important that I accomplished.
What baffles me, though, is that the US has roughly 3 million federal employees. What will they do with 3 million emails pouring in to Musk’s office? The link above has an idea: they’re just going to shovel them all into an AI as training data, and possibly to search for fireable statements.
Actually, the best kind of response is like this one, from the department of defense.
DoD personnel may have received an email from OPM requesting information. The Department of Defense is responsible for reviewing the performance of its personnel and it will conduct any review in accordance with its own procedures. When and if required, the Department will coordinate responses to the email you have received from OPM. For now, please pause any response to the OPM email titled “What did you do last week.”
That’s right. Just ignore the spam email.
I do wonder if Darin S. Selnick still has his job.
Here’s a different kind of reaction from a Democrat:
Good god, we have to get rid of these geriatric do-nothings in the Democratic party. By the way, Gerry Connolly was chosen by house democrats over AOC to chair the oversight committee.
This is why Democrats lose.
A friend suggests outsourcing the reply to your preferred LLM:
“I work for the US government and have been asked to provide a list of 5 things that I did last week. Make up a list for me of items that sound highly productive but are completely unverifiable.”
Let’s see, last week I…
Went to work.
Went to class.
Shopped around for a car. (I’m going with a gently-used 2021 Chevy Spark)
Worried about the fate of human civilization.
Avoided my father.
There! Happy Elon?
Wonder if Senator Smith will get a nasty gram from the DoJ for calling Musk a dick. That’s kind of what happened to Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Cal). In a hearing, Garcia held up a picture of Musk calling it a “dick pic”…you know like Marjorie Taylor Green did of Hunter Biden. The DoJ letter actually concerned a CNN interview with Garcia in which he said, “What the American public wants is for us to bring actual weapons to this bar fight. This is an actual fight for democracy.”
Sen. Chuck Schumer also got a DoJ letter, but not sure why.
I just checked, there are over 3 million federal employees. Do these DOGE dumbasses expect to receive over 3 million emails? And then read them all in a timely fashion? Nonsense. Even if they did, would they understand the tsunami of scientific and professional jargon that flowed into their inboxes? No effing way. Whoever dreamed up this nutty idea needs to find a new occupation. I know — how about picking cantaloupes in the hot California sun after they deported all the undocumented immigrants doing the stoop work no contemporary American would dream of doing.
AFAICT, all the west coast Senators have been very vocal in opposing the Trump/Musk power grab.
Here is Adam Schiff from California.
So much so that they aren’t getting much coverage from the mainstream media.
Here is the senator from Oregon.
The Senator from Washington has had a lot to say.
Meanwhile,
administration lawyers have been insisting that Musk is not the head of DOGE*.
* I like to think of it as DOG-E, pronounced the same as “doggie”
“…reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets…”
Yes, 5 bullets might be an appropriate response.
For an example of an AI generated list, see What Did I Do Last Week. I bet people are having LLMs generate their response, and the administration is using LLMs to ‘read’ them.
The appropriate response of a lot of employees in the departments these e-mails were directed to would be:
“During the past week, I [redacted — national security]/[redacted — Privacy Act of 1974].”
The Doge† sent these letters to, among others, DoD employees for whom describing their daily tasks and duties would constitute an Essential Element of Friendly Information — nonclassified data that is nonetheless sensitive and valuable to a hostile adversary. But these baby techbros are just the salt of the earth, the common clay…
† I prefer to think of these clowns as being under the “leadership” of the Doge of Venice, which fits better than they conceive. Yes, I’m inviting you do go down a rabbit hole (that will be both more entertaining and less distressing than anything in the news today).
The election of the Doge of Venice was less arcane than the US Electoral College, I’ll say that for them.
What’s happened in Germany. I just saw something about a “conservative” party getting the most votes in the election but they’ll have to form a coalition government. Doesn’t sound promising.
robro: it’s Merkel’s old party. Centre-right, strong Europe, unplug from the U.S. to be able to face the threat of Russia, support Ukraine, dislikes immigrants (Merkel was an anomaly on the immigration issue in her party), normally highly opposed to neonazis (though Merz seems to think there’s room for collaboration with them, unlike the rest of his party).
At least it sounds like they’re not quite ready to cave and let the nazis into government, despite them being the second-largest party. So, that’s good…ish?
The current Democrats remind me of Crispen Glover’s portrayal of George McFly from the beginning of Back to the Future: Weak, nebbish, cowardly, cringing, always afraid of “conflict” and “rejection,” and is always kowtowing and making excuses for the right… I mean, Biff.
Federal workers sue over Elon Musk’s threat to fire them if they don’t explain their accomplishments
Merz’s first statement was that the EU needed to support Ukraine and be able to function without the US.
Yes, PZ, there are a handful of positive, caring, honest, shouting voices in congress like Tina Smith, Ron Wyden, even Kinzinger has his moments. But, they are muffled by the majority who are either murderously complacent or are magats. And, sadly, the positive voices can’t stop the murderous actions of the MUMP cult. It is sad now someone like zelenskyy can be politically assassinated by the likes of felon muskrat, magat and pus-brain putin.
Martha and the Vandellas still sing in my head: Nowhere to run to, baby, nowhere to hide.
@15 Reginald Selkirk wrote about Federal workers sue over Elon Musk
I reply: HOWEVER, the felon muskrat, the magat in chief and their henchmen IGNORE and ARE NOT STOPPED by lawsuits or court actions.
Trump Sucks Elon Musk’s Toes in AI Video Played on Federal Agency TVs
The counter-revolution will be televised?
@4 He’s probably already worked out which departments/positions that he’s going to axe and the email is just a fig leaf to cover himself. The email is almost word for word for the one he sent to Twitter employees when he took over.
Latest atrocity from Musk.
Patty Murray is the Washington Senator.
They just fired a whole lot of Bonneville Power Adminstration employees.
To explain for people not in the Pacific Northwest.
The Bonneville Power Adminstration was set up by Roosevelt during the Depression. It adminsters the 31 dams on the Columbia river system and the Hanford nuclear reactor.
“OPB: Today, a third of all power consumed in the Pacific Northwest comes from BPA, which owns 75% of the region’s electrical transmission lines.
The BPA budget and those salaries don’t come out of the Federal budget.
BPA is a huge generator and seller of electricity.
They are self funded and make enough money to pay those salaries.
Trump and Musk are just deliberately breaking things as fast as they can without caring what harm they are doing to the USA.
The old tech saying, Move fast and break things.
Wrecking the BPA will cut off the electricity to 3 million people in the PNW.
A whole lot of those are going to be…Trump voters.
Been there, done that. I worked for a government department when a noxious bunch of conservatives got in and proceeded to stack departments with contracted flunkies on well-padded salaries and benefits. Of course these flunkies had “support” staff also draining the payroll at the expense of filling multiple vacant but more essential positions.
One of their first decrees was that every employee had to compile a list of projects they were working on and send it to the flunky’s section. Most of were going to list a few things and get back to doing some real work but some came up with the idea of finely dividing each of their jobs into into small tasks and listing each task as a project. Of course 3 months later we were expected to report on progress on each of these. More time wasting, particularly for one supervisor where the combined total of projects of his staff was in the hundreds. That system collapsed under its own weight but various iterations of it continued until the conservatives got the boot and sanity prevailed.
It did have one positive. By tracking and reviewing what their staff were doing it made their annual section progress review much easier.
… probably the least significant… tasks I did …
Not from the arachnid point of view!
I hope a copy of this demand went to sub-prez Donald J. Trump – he could report his (recorded, not actual of course) golfing scores from the most recent of the nine days (out of the last 30) he spent on the links since his inauguration.
@numerobis:
The Merz CDU is not Merkel’s party. (Merkel and Merz at least dislike each other.) Merkel had moved the party to the center. Merz reversed that, and also tries to reverse progress wherever he can. He ran a xenophobic campaign which helped the AfD more than the CDU.
Musk’s demand has no function other than disruption of the essential functions of the federal government and harassment of its employees. He wants to prove that government is useless by making it so, to ensure that it has no way of limiting his power even if Trump tires of him and throws him out of the charmed circle.