Elon Musk claimed that only 6% of federal workers work full time in their offices. This would be dismissed as manifestly false by anyone with any sense. And yet, this lie took wings. Stephen Engelberg, editor of ProPublica, writes that although this was just one of the many falsehoods put out by Trump-Musk (another manifestly false and ridiculous one was that $50 million was sent to Gaza for condoms), it was worthwhile to see how it came about, as a case study of how assertions made by fringe people can, in the current climate, become repeated by more influential ones and thus quickly accquire the status of fact for the cult followers.
As the administration of President Donald Trump throws one government agency after another into the “wood chipper,” a startling statistic about federal workers keeps coming up: Only 6% of federal employees are working full time in their offices.
By any post-pandemic standard, it’s an astoundingly low number, particularly as major American corporations move to force workers back to the office five days a week.
It’s also completely untrue.
…The 6% statistic burst into the public consciousness in early December of last year when Sen. Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican, released a report on federal workers with the provocative title: “Out of Office: Bureaucrats on the beach and in bubble baths but not in office buildings.”
…The claim was immediately picked up by The New York Post, commentator Sean Hannity and other Trump allies. Hannity tweeted “JOB FOR DOGE: Only 6% of Federal Employees work from an Office Full-time, Some not working at All: Audit.”
…Musk retweeted the Post story to his more than 200 million followers soon after it appeared. He said things were even worse than the report had found, asserting that “if you exclude security guards & maintenance personnel, the number of government workers who show up in person and do 40 hours of work a week is closer to 1%! Almost no one.”
…On Jan. 20, Trump’s first day in office, the White House issued a statement that obliquely referred to Musk’s coming assault on federal agencies. It said Trump was “planning for improved accountability of government bureaucrats. The American people deserve the highest-quality service from people who love our country. The President will also return federal workers to work, as only 6% of employees currently work in person.”
A week after that, a senior administration official cited the 6% figure in explaining plans to slash the size of the federal workforce through buyouts. “We’re five years past COVID and just 6% of federal employees work full-time in office,” the official told Axios and NBC News. The quotation also appeared in a memo sent by the White House to Republican allies, the Daily Wire reported.
…On Wednesday in Miami, Trump said federal workers should “show up to work in person like the rest of us,” adding that: “You can’t work at home. They’re not working. They’re playing tennis, they’re playing golf, or they have other jobs. But they’re not working, or they’re certainly not working hard.” (Multiple news outlets noted that Trump had golfed on nine of his first 30 days in office.)
Engleberg said that he was immediately skeptical of the report because he has covered the military and knows that the nature of handling classified information means that almost no one in the defense department can work from home, and they constitute a large chunk of federal employees.
I searched online for a copy of the Ernst report and quickly found the passage that said, “Six percent report in-person on a full-time basis while nearly a third of the government workforce is entirely remote.” A footnote cited a single source: a story published months earlier by Federal News Network, a news organization in the suburbs of Washington that closely covers the world of government workers. The organization had invited readers to answer an online survey about their work habits, drawing 6,338 from the federal workforce of 2.2 million. A story about the survey by reporter Drew Friedman noted that only 6% of the respondents reported working full time in the office.
The day after Ernst released her report, Federal News Network added an editor’s note to the post saying that Friedman’s story had been reworked to “clarify that the survey was a non-scientific survey of respondents who self-reported that they are current federal employees, and who were self-selected.”
…Jared Serbu, the deputy editor of Federal News Network, said he and his colleagues were taken aback by how his organization’s clearly unscientific survey had somehow been transformed into a defining statistic about federal employees.
“It was a survey of our niche audience for our niche audience,” Serbu said. “Nobody’s ever been confused about it before this.”
But Musk-Trump and Leavitt are not confused. They are using this false statistic to drive their efforts to fire people.
they know that government requires workers and they intend to hire them in the future -- after they’ve destroyed every union and every higher salary person, replaced all management with party apparatchiks. at that point they’ll hire disposable peons at high turnover rates to work in orwellian conditions and constant abuse, because that’s the only way they can imagine people feeling motivated to do work.
what it will actually do is motivate people to steal your personal information and shore up their meager resources by selling that to organized crime. which is NBD for the government they want to create, which basically is organized crime.
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what it will actually do is motivate people to steal your personal information and shore up their meager resources by selling that to organized crime
Act now!
Actually, from what I know of the OMP data security breach, the Chinese government doesn’t want that old data. There probably isn’t a worthwhile secret in the US of A, except maybe Turnip’s MRIs.
Seems a lot like the sort of thing that would happen if a young intern asked a generative LLM to find a survey to show how federal employees spent insufficient time in the office — and the machine obliged with a helpful and plausible result which it did not understand at all.
And the intern passed this off as their own plausible and helpful research while not understanding it at all.
Predictably, it was believed by an entire ruling party, and its adherents, uncomfortably aware that they should avoid understanding it at all costs.
@Bébé Mélange, 1:
When I first read Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash in 1992, it seemed implausible that the US federal government could be hollowed out to the extent it was and that the entire country would be run mostly by the Mafia and other corporate fronts for organised crime.
Then the last six weeks happened. Then I read your post #1. Then I remembered Snow Crash and it feels like, with respect to that element of the world-building at least, we’ll be there before the decade is out… possibly before the year is out.
(Hedging because I recently re-read something I posted on here during Liz Truss’s time as UK Prime Minister (remember her?), where I very confidently asserted that she’d be ousted by the end of the year. She lasted about another 48 hours. So much for my skills at prediction.)
Another stupid thing about any statistic on how many government employees are working in the office, is that there are plenty of jobs for which full time working in the office would be evidence you were definitely not doing you job properly. I realise that most of them have been sacked, and this may in fact be one reason, but I wouldn’t expect say park rangers to spend all of their time in the office or water and air quality scientists or weather scientists or all sorts of other kinds of scientists come to that, even if you count being in the lab as being in the office. just all round dishonesty along with malice.