Elon Musk Tells The Bureaucrats To Explain What They Do

Consistent with President @realDonaldTrump’s instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week.

Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 22, 2025

During my career, I worked for government agencies at various times as an employee, a conttactor, and an employee of private companies who performed work on site at government agencies. I would say that the problem of staff who have no discernible duties is universal, hardly limited to government, although it's more visible there.

I recall some years ago reading an account of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas's time as chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission between 1982 and 1990. According to Wikipedia, he was credited with improving the efficiency of the EEOC. Settlement award amounts to victims of discrimination tripled, while the number of suits filed decreased.

The account I read, but haven't been able to find now, said that one of his techniques for doing this was to go down to the cafeteria in the mornings and insist that the employees finish their coffee and go back to the office. I thought of this sometime later when I was working for a quasi-government agency that was in a building with a cafe on the ground floor. I would often go down there for lunch, but not for much else.

One day, the proprietor came to my table and asked, "Do you work for XYZ upstairs?"

"Yes," I said.

"Do you know you're the only one who works there who isn't down here all day long? You come down for lunch, and that's it."

I know I had weekly meetings with my boss, where I was expected to do exactly what Elon Musk now says federal employees will be expected to do, give their boss a list of things they'd done over the past week. I always did this, although sometimes, as any smart subordinate would do, I maybe overstressed some of the importance of one or another item. But at each of these meetings, my boss became increasingly exasperated, picking through each item in more and more detail. "You said you did this. But how long did that really take you?"

"Maybe half an hour," I might say. "But it was one of the things I had on the project plan, and I got it done."

"But you're just setting this whole list up to make yourself look good." I didn't have much to answer -- I thought subordinates ought to be entitled to give the best account of themselves. But later I heard my boss was known for always being out in the building courtyard on a more or less permanent cigarette break.

At another job, I was working for the company I've described here before, Technology Associates. I was at a customer site as the on-site rep. The manager there one day called my boss at TA, I'm not sure why. and said, "He's one of the best workers I have. He's here on time every morning, and he gets right down to work."

My boss at TA gave me a call. "I've been hearing you get to work on time, and you get right down to work. They think very highly of you. Do you know what that says to me? It says you're trying to put yourself between TA and the customer." I thought I was supposed to make TA look good, but I knew that if I answered that, I'd be in even more trouble.

Well, the problem of employees who don't do anything isn't limited to government, but it's certainly there. Via The Atlantic,

President Donald Trump and his billionaire adviser Elon Musk justify dismantling the civil service as cost cutting. The federal government has “billions and billions of dollars in waste, fraud, and abuse,” Trump claimed earlier this month, and Musk has complained about a “staggering amount of waste of taxpayer money.” Their actions—a barrage of executive orders, memos, layoffs, and attempts to unilaterally eliminate entire agencies—have sparked outrage, but Musk sees that only as proof of their achievements: “They wouldn’t be complaining so much if we weren’t doing something useful.”

. . . The Trump administration has created a toxic work environment. I’ve spent 25 years studying public administration and have never seen anything like the deep sense of dread that federal employees are now experiencing. I spoke with workers who feared reprisal if their names were published. One told me that there’s an “eerie” mood in the Census Bureau office: “No one can openly discuss anything.” Another civil servant said that people who’ve worked in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for decades are afraid and “can’t believe what’s happening.”

Press reports of Musk's demand that workers document what they've done indicate that this is simply the same thing he did when he took over Twitter in 2022.

The day before Musk closed his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter, which he’s re-dubbed X, he walked through the front door with a sink. Starting within hours of his takeover the following day, Musk took something like a hacksaw to the company, moves that he said were essential to “save” the company but that caused chaos.

. . . Still, while the takeover may have hurt Twitter employees, users, advertisers and – at least in one sense — Musk’s own pocketbook, it has also added to his own personal power. Over the summer, Musk used X to try to sway public opinion in favor of Trump. And since Trump’s reelection, Musk now has the president’s ear and an office in the White House — and he’s become tens of billions of additional dollars richer, on the back of expectations that his connection to Trump will benefit his empire of companies.

And for that reason, he may have little incentive to change his employment – and layoff – strategy in his new role at DOGE.

My view is that Musk simply understands how the world works and acts accordingly.