Working Hard Or Hardly Working?

The biggest issue that's struck me about the Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ICU kerfuffle is that he didn't show up for work for almost two weeks, and nobody noticed. I simply don't know how you get around that. This normally doesn't happen at lower levels, at least when I was working, although COVID's lasting effect may have changed some things -- but even there, the current consensus seems to be that "working from home" hasn't worked out, and employers have reimposed some level of required attendance. And of course, there were and are some jobs for which you simply have to show up. You can't drive a bus and work from home.

This might even apply to a job like US Secretary of Defense, who is in the military chain of command. Even in the December holiday period, issues like Ukraine, Gaza, and Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping didn't go away. But the Secretary was gone, nobody noticed, and nobody knew why. Beyond that, his deputy, who would be his understudy in such a case, was on vacation and was also unaware of his absence:

After being admitted to the hospital last week, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin transferred responsibility to Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks on Tuesday. But Hicks, who was on vacation in Puerto Rico at the time, was not informed about his hospitalization until Thursday, a senior defense official told NBC News.

Again, this doesn't happen at lower levels. Everybody knows about out-of-the-office phone mail or e-mail messages that explain how long you'll be gone and whom to contact while you're away. This didn't happen at the highest levels of the Biden administration, and nobody noticed. But the problems don't stop there.

Pentagon spokesman Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said over the weekend that Austin went into the hospital for an elective procedure on December 22 when he was on leave, went home the following day and “continued to work from home through the holidays.” The secretary, Ryder said, began experiencing “severe pain” and was transported from his home to Walter Reed by an ambulance on January 1, where he was admitted to the intensive care unit.

We're really back to the whole "working from home" charade here.

Late Friday afternoon [January 5], the Department of Defense released a statement saying that Austin was in the intensive care unit at Walter Reed NMC due to "complications" from an unspecified "elective" surgical procedure. The statement revealed that he'd been admitted to the ICU on New Year's Day. As happens with these things, more facts started dribbling out. . . .The service chiefs, service secretaries, and other senior Pentagon staff found out two hours before the public announcement. We were told that Austin's deputy, Kathleen Hicks, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Joe Biden got the news on Thursday (keep this sentence in mind because we're going to talk more about that later). Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman C. Q. Brown was told on Tuesday. Supposedly, Austin's chief of staff, Kelly Magsamen, found out on Tuesday, but she was home with the "flu" and decided to wait until she got back to work on Thursday before telling anyone.

At some point, Austin's personal staff started telling people that he was "working from home."

It gradually emerged that Austin's original surgery had been under general anesthesia for prostate cancer treatment. Any type of surgery under general anesthesia is a big deal, and based on my own recent experience, you're generally put on some kind of restricted activity regimen afterward. Beyond that, Secretary Austin is reported to be a devout Roman Catholic, for whom it is generally felt appropriate that someone undergoing surgery under general anesthesia, especially at Austin's age, receive the sacrament of anointing of the sick. In other words, major surgery is a big deal. Recovery from such surgery is not "working from home", but of course, "working from home" isn't really working from home in any case.

I will say that I've occasionally been in jobs where nobody cared whether you showed up or not. They were in organizations that gave new meaning to the word "dysfunctional", and by the nature of things, they never lasted long. This says more about what working in the Biden administration is actually like than it says about Secretary Austin, although there are reasonable questions about whether he should have made the reason for his initial hospitalization, and his subsequent return to the ICU, much clearer than he did.

The big question isn't that Austin didn't show up for work for almost two weeks without anyone noticing. The big question is that Joe Biden was also gone for even longer, and apparently so little work was getting done by anyone else that nobody noticed the Defense Secretary was in the ICU. That reflects much more on Joe and his handlers than on Austin. As I say, I've been in jobs where that sort of thing could happen, but they never lasted very long, and that's the real point.