One of the enduring right wing myths is that if only the government was run like a business, then everything would be fine. Not just any kind of business but a sole proprietorship where one person has the ability to make all the decisions. They think that if this were the case, here would be no waste, no fraud, and all employees would work at peak efficiency all the time. This idyllic state would be obtained by because of the ability to fire people at will, so that employees are in a state of perpetual fear and uncertainty and thus will not do anything other than work. Right wingers believe that employee protections from arbitrary management actions and firings, workplace safety rules, and limits on what employees can be expected to do and how long and when they work, are all things that reward inefficiency.
Musk’s actions since being given so much power by Trump shows that he definitely thinks along those lines. All the summary decisions that seem to have been taken without much thought, such as firing people, eliminating agencies, and cutting budgets all show that mindset.
But perhaps the most emblematic of that mindset, and the stupidest thing he has done was to issue a demand to all federal workers that within 48 hours (and that was also over a weekend) they had to provide five bullet points listing all that they had done in the past week. If they did not do so, they would be considered to have resigned.
Hundreds of thousands of federal workers have been given little more than 48 hours to explain what they accomplished over the last week, sparking confusion across key agencies as billionaire Elon Musk expands his drive to slash the size of federal government.
Musk, who serves as President Donald Trump’s cost-cutting chief, telegraphed the extraordinary request Saturday on his social media network.
“Consistent with President @realDonaldTrump’s instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week,” Musk posted on X, which he owns. “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”
Shortly afterward, federal employees — including some judges, court staff and federal prison officials — received a three-line email with this instruction: “Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager.”
The deadline to reply was listed as Monday at 11:59 p.m., although the email did not include Musk’s social media threat about those who fail to respond.
…McLaurine Pinover, a spokesperson at the Office of Personnel Management, confirmed Musk’s directive and said that individual agencies would “determine any next steps.”
What happens if an employee is on leave or vacation? Again, she said individual agencies would determine how to proceed.
…Labor union leaders quickly condemned the ultimatum and threatened legal action.
AFGE President Everett Kelley called the new order an example of Trump and Musk’s “utter disdain for federal employees and the critical services they provide to the American people.”
“It is cruel and disrespectful to hundreds of thousands of veterans who are wearing their second uniform in the civil service to be forced to justify their job duties to this out-of-touch, privileged, unelected billionaire who has never performed one single hour of honest public service in his life,” Kelley said. “AFGE will challenge any unlawful terminations of our members and federal employees across the country.”
Some may recall how after Musk bought Twitter, he similarly ordered all engineers to fly in within 48. hours and personally justify to him what they were doing for the company. Hee also demanded that they agree to work long hours at high intensity.
This new demand for five bullet points was too much even for some ardent Trumper extremists like the new FBI director Kash Patel, the Department of Homeland Security, and heads of other agencies who quickly informed their employees that they did not need to comply with this demand.
he US government’s human resources office has walked back an ultimatum issued by Elon Musk that would have forced its workers to resign if they did not submit a bullet-point list of their recent accomplishments, in one of the first signs of internal pushback to the Tesla billionaire’s campaign to downsize the federal workforce.
The FBI’s new director, Trump loyalist Kash Patel, asked agents to “please pause any responses”, while at the homeland security department, employees were similarly informed that “no reporting action from you is needed at this time”. All employees at the Department of Defense, who now answer to the former Fox News host and Trump acolyte Pete Hegseth as defense secretary, were similarly ordered not to respond to the OPM’s missive.
Employees in other federal departments were told to await further orders or to simply ignore Musk’s edict. Workers in the Social Security Administration and the health and human services department were told to comply with the email, and CNN reported that the Department of Transportation ordered all its employees to respond to the Musk email by its deadline. That included air traffic controllers who are currently struggling with severe understaffing and a spate of recent accidents.
Other agencies have similarly blocked Musk’s edict.
“The State Department will respond on behalf of the Department. No employee is obligated to report their activities outside of their Department chain of command,” according to an email from Tibor Nagy, acting undersecretary for management, that was obtained by The Associated Press.
…In a message to employees on Saturday night, federal court officials instructed recipients not to respond.
“We understand that some judges and judiciary staff have received an email … directing the recipient to reply with 5 accomplishments from the prior week. Please be advised that this email did not originate from the Judiciary or the Administrative Office and we suggest that no action be taken,” officials wrote.
Apart from anything else, it is not clear what anyone could do with all the date collected., assuming that people sent in their five bullet points. The sheer volume alone is daunting.
But that is irrelevant. This is simply another power play, to show everyone that he is the boss and can jerk them around at will.
Musk is deliberately throwing the government into chaos, just to show that he can. He may think he can quickly reconstruct a new order but I think he is going to be surprised.
Musk’s motto is to move fast and break things.
So far, the most definitive evidence of Musk accomplishing anything is the cratering in value of X and of Tesla. OK then.
USA probably long overdue for a cratering of its value
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again -- if you think the value of Twitter has cratered, you don’t understand what value means. Sure, the price in dollars that any putative buyer would be prepared to pay Musk to take over Twitter is vastly less than what he was legally required to pay for it. But the metric there is the US dollar, and regardless of what some people may think, it’s not really possible to put a dollar value on everything.
For instance: what is the dollar value, to Musk, of being President? Because THAT is the “value” of Twitter. His $44b didn’t buy Twitter, it bought control of the US government. Sounds cheap when you put it that way, doesn’t it? Sounds even cheaper when you remember he didn’t even buy it with his own money -- the money paid for Twitter came from elsewhere, in the form of loans tied to the value of the asset. Which goes back to the old saying: “when you owe the bank $44,000 and you can’t pay them back, you have a problem. When you owe the bank $44,000,000,000 and you’re suddenly the most powerful man in the goverment -- THE BANK HAS A PROBLEM.”
It is indeed interesting to see people like Patel pushing back against this nonsense. I wonder how long he’ll let them carry on doing that…
sonofrojblake:
But that, I am quite sure, is who others are talking about. So it would appear we understand value quite well since we’re in agreement. Thanks anyway.
The joke is that there’s just as much waste and fraud and inefficiency in private industry. I worked in the financial industry for 20+ years, and the amount of time wasted in pointless stuff mandated by the overbosses, the amount of effort wasted by the overbosses telling us to drop the previous “must be done yesterday” projects and put all our effort into some new “must be done yesterday” project, which will eventually be dropped, was staggering. Like Musk, they don’t understand what their company / departments do and so their micromanagement just gets in the way. And their contempt for their workers leads people like me to retire sooner than we would have, thus losing them decades of knowledge and experience.
Presidents Musk and Trump are doing exactly what “private industry” managers do that drive their companies into bankrupcy. (Of course, maybe that’s the point.)
I enjoy Sara Cooper’s political videos as an antidote to the chaos currently occurring.
The History of Wealth Throughout History
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9cJ1IZsp750
King Trump’s Plans to Invade Canada and More -- INSIDE THE COOP with Sarah Cooper.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=F4K7AFQXhXQ
The second link explains multiple strange tech-bro business practices like demanding everyone write a 5 bullet point list of their job. I’m quite certain that the duties of all federal employees are codified and easily available for doge to examine, but of course that’s not the point of the exercise.
In the “he said it not me” department:
My emphasis.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-02-25/us-agency-tells-federal-workers-they-can-ignore-elon-musk-email/104978856
I just did the experiment of asking grok 3 (Musk’s chatbot) about this, and got a stunningly sensible response. Turing test passed with flying colors imo. Its master probably couldn’t do better. Here is the Q&A.
Q:
Elon Musk sent an email to around 3 million federal government employees asking them to respond with 5 bullet points of things they did last week. He proposed to feed the responses to a LLM (probably you) with a view to some kind of activity-based analysis of who to retain and who to fire. What is the feasibility of such an idea?
A:
Elon Musk’s idea of having 3 million federal employees submit five bullet points about their work from the past week, then feeding that data into an LLM for an activity-based analysis of who to retain or fire, is ambitious and theoretically possible but comes with significant practical, ethical, and technical challenges. Let’s break it down.
First, the sheer scale of data—15 million bullet points (3 million employees times five each)—is manageable for a modern LLM, especially one designed for large-scale analysis. With enough computational power, I could process that volume, extract patterns, categorize activities, and even score productivity or relevance based on predefined criteria. For example, I could identify who’s doing high-impact work (e.g., solving critical problems) versus low-value tasks (e.g., attending endless meetings), assuming the criteria are clear. The tech exists to handle this, and xAI’s infrastructure could likely support it.
The bigger issue is the quality of the input. People know they’re being judged, so they’ll game the system. You’d get polished, exaggerated, or outright fabricated bullet points—think “Saved the department $10 million” versus “Answered 12 emails.” Without a way to verify truthfulness, the data’s unreliable. Cross-referencing with other sources (e.g., project logs, emails, or output metrics) could help, but that’s a massive undertaking for 3 million people and not something an LLM can do alone without integration into government systems.
Then there’s the analysis itself. I could cluster employees by role, department, or task type and flag outliers—say, someone whose bullet points suggest they’re redundant or underperforming. But “retain or fire” decisions need context an LLM can’t fully grasp: organizational goals, team dynamics, or intangible contributions like morale. Plus, federal jobs often involve bureaucracy or compliance work that looks mundane on paper but is legally required. How do you weigh that against, say, innovation? Musk would need to define razor-sharp metrics, and even then, the model’s biases (or the biases in the training data) could skew results.
Legally and ethically, this is a minefield. Federal employees have unions, protections, and due process rights—mass analysis for firing could spark lawsuits or congressional backlash. Privacy’s another hurdle; those bullet points might contain sensitive info, and feeding them into an AI raises data security questions. Musk might argue it’s opt-in, but with jobs on the line, it’s coercive in practice.
Finally, execution speed matters. Processing 15 million bullet points, generating insights, and making recommendations could take days or weeks, depending on the depth of analysis. Musk loves fast results, but refining this into actionable decisions—especially with human oversight—wouldn’t be instant.
In short, it’s feasible as a concept: I could crunch the data and spit out a ranked list. But making it fair, accurate, and legally defensible? That’s a monumental challenge. It’d work better as a thought experiment or a pilot with a smaller, controlled group—say, a single agency—before scaling up. What do you think Musk’s endgame is here? Just efficiency, or something bigger?
acsglster @#8,
Wow, that was a pretty impressive analysis of the possibilities and problems of this plan!
That was a great idea on your part to do it and the prompt was excellent!
.
… if only the government was run like a business, then everything would be fine.
This usually comes with a demand that the government shrink drastically.
Someone please find me a business which intends to shrink.
Found Musk’s next goal.
8 acsglster:
The AI did pretty well. It even came close to realizing there are no objective metrics for many of these things and that Musk could easily and intentionally bias the output based on what he trains the model with.
Another aspect of the ‘run like a business’ thing, particularly with Musk…
Both SpaceX and Tesla (especially SpaceX) reportedly had multiple people whose primary job was pretty much to distract Musk with shiny things and let him think his orders were being followed while providing cover for the people in the trenches to do their actual work. Doing things like letting folks continue researching radar-based collision avoidance despite Musk’s insistence that the self-driving system would be visual only, because they knew that the technology just wasn’t up to visual-only operation. In many ways both could get away with this because were fairly large and well-established businesses before Musk, and Musk’s own narcissism hadn’t completely metastasized yet.
This sort of thing became clearer when Musk bought Twitter, because Twitter didn’t have the people in place to redorect Musk, too much of the company culture was already ‘tech-bro’ aligned with him, and by that point Musk was in full ‘I am a certifiable genius who can do no wrong’ mode and was convinced he was the sole source of success even though Tesla and SpaceX were mostly demonstrating what success they had in spite of him.
Musk and Trump are both absolutely horrible bosses that actively make things worse for anybody working for them, and this was evident long before either got to this level of power. Neither of them would actually be anywhere near as rich as they are without having inherited massive levels of wealth from their fathers, enough to allow them both to fail upwards.
Frankly, the naked worship of wealth and celebrity that allowed them to get away with what they were doing is a significant chunk of the problem.
Government run as a business:
Reducing taxes on the wealthy is like Mattel reducing marketing efforts at kids and/or their parents.