Department of Government Efficiency head says he wants to test whether federal employees are ‘capable of replying to an email’

Summary

Elon Musk admitted that his mass email to federal employees demanding weekly accomplishment reports sent to him or risk termination was a test to gauge responsiveness.

Musk tried to frame the move as a “pulse check” on bureaucrats.

The email caused confusion, with some agency leaders advising staff to ignore it, while others initially instructed compliance before reversing course.

A rift emerged as top officials at the FBI, Pentagon, State Department, Department of Homeland Security, and Department of Energy openly defied Musk’s directive, highlighting tensions within the administration.

  • stopdropandprole@lemmy.world
    49·
    15 hours ago

    federal workers are terrified right now that if they make one wrong step, they’ll be on their asses, with families and mortgages depending on them to be perfect.

    this email alone resulted in thousands of unplanned mandatory meetings with supervisors, checking with coworkers, asking PR and internal communications experts, consulting with division directors, on and on up the chain of command.

    trust me, they spent way more than 10 minutes, more like hours and hours per employee across the whole govt.

    • bean@lemmy.world
      25·
      14 hours ago

      I wonder how much money that accounts for. Sounds like this unelected ketamine fueled fuckwit is wasting government money. I hear there is an efficiency department now, someone should report him for excessive waste of public taxpayer funded money.

      • IsoKiero@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        7·
        10 hours ago

        I wonder how much money that accounts for

        Let’s throw some numbers around. Quick google search says that federal workers make $35/hour on average and that there’s about 3 million workers. Let’s be generous for Elmo and say that only half of the workers received and/or reacted to the email and that they only spent an hour on responding, attending to meetings with colleagues and so on about the case.

        So, 1.5 million hours * 35 dollars per hour equals to cool 52,5 million. Adjust numbers on how ever you like. 50-200 million is a big pile of cash, but in the US government scale that’s not much above a rounding error. Pretty hefty bill anyways from a single email sent by a guy whose authorization on anything is pretty much just ‘trust me bro’.

      • errer@lemmy.worldEnglish
        101·
        12 hours ago

        Government discretionary budget is like $2T. Wasting say a quarter of a day (2 hours) of the 250 or so working days in a year is about 1/1000th the total year wasted. So figure $2B wasted, approximately.