His joy about all this (the emoji replies and memes) is really amazing. These people have 0 empathy. What's spectacular is he's not even smart enough to pretend to have empathy and somehow managed to outrun any consequences so far (our system is going to need some retooling when all this flames out so white collar justice is a lot faster). What's even more amazing and sad is people the people still worship him despite that.
He really is remarkably personally repellant. Like, even people who are ideologically aligned with him, I don’t understand how they put up with the persona.
What about people who work on classified programs? Are they supposed to send a description of their work to a non-classified system?
Or people who work in the field and aren't using email regularly? Do the people who clear trails for the National Parks Service check their email every day?
The goal is demoralization of all government workers. It doesn't matter what the employees do as the email and stress it causes is the goal, not the response to the email.
4.2. What opportunities are available for individuals to consent to uses, decline to provide information, or opt out of the project?
The Employee Response Data is explicitly voluntary. The individual federal government employees can opt out simply by not responding to the email.
4.3. Privacy Impact Analysis: Related to Notice
Privacy Risk: There is a risk that individuals will not realize their response is voluntary.
Mitigation: This risk is mitigated by ensuring that any email sent using GWES is clear, by explicitly stating that the response is voluntary, and by including specific instructions for a response.
Again more action for action's sake. From Umberto Eco’s List of the 14 Common Features of Fascism:
Even with the recent firings, there are over 2 million full time federal employees. Who's going to be reading and evaluating these emails? There is no person, and certainly no algorithm, capable of doing so in any responsible way.
DODGE is that clueless middle manager who thinks they know everything, doesn’t listen to anyone who knows, and will declare victory then inevitably make a run for it before they face the consequences of the own actions.
Don't steelman for them. They know what they are doing. Making things miserable is the point, not an accidental side effect. They have been very public about this. They have talked way more about damaging/breaking the administrative class than they have about efficiency. You stellmaning a benevolent position on their part is creating a false narrative that goes against their own words.
Covering for their intentional destruction/damaging of the US government it is absolutely benevolence. This is not incompetence, this is not a poorly implemented plan to improve the government. They have been planning this since Trump lost the last election and this is exactly what it looks like and what they have said it is over and over. This is not a time when Hanlon's razor applies because these people have been vocal as to their intentions/purposes/goals.
Serious questions: are the country's institutions strong enough to provide for checks and balances against the executive branch as it grows unchecked, in reality? If so, how does that play out? Are the timescales of the checks and balances always receding from a never ending stream of things that need accountability?
The federalist papers are the source material that answer your questions. Lincoln's 1838 Lyceum speech, and 1st inaugural address are also relevant, covering mob rule, disputes between minority and majority, and what happens if one doesn't yield.
My opinion is no. The institutions are not strong enough on their own, and this is by design. It compels the people to stand up for the Constitution. And they should want to do that if they know even a little bit about power.
The core concept of the Constitution is polyarchy, to intentionally fragment power, to make ambition counter ambition. The founders' concern was the concentration of power. When government fails, power doesn't return to the people. The people don't somehow become free, as if they weren't already free. The power is consolidated by a small number of individuals, and the people become subject to their tyranny. The design of the government is to make it difficult for power to consolidate in secret or quickly, giving the people every opportunity to stand opposed to the consolidation of power.
A president could ignore the judiciary, violating their oath office which imparts a fiduciary duty to uphold the law. And a Congress could fail to impeach and remove from office such a president. Indeed both occurring at once implies an enormously weak citizenry, ripe for power consolidating in front of them.
But it can't be said the people have chosen to end Constitutional order by doing so. The Constitution of the United States is a contract, ratified by state legislatures. The only legitimate way to dissolve the contract is for 3/4 of the states to ratify an amendment calling for it.
State governors especially will not be so docile as the Congress. As federal programs are increasingly left in abeyance, and money earmarked for the states is held up or clawed back, I expect to see governors become more assertive.
It probably is highly illegal, just like the last mass firing, but by the time either gets through the process for adjudicating potentially illegal employment actions in the federal government, they'll have done ten more, and lots of people will give up and decide working for the federal government isn't worth it at each step.
This is an easy way to get rid of a large percentage of government workers who don’t have a requirement to check email everyday. People out in the field or even people out sick or on vacation, etc.
Reading between the lines. Musk thought the government would be like Twitter. However, he is getting increasingly frustrated and didn’t comprehend how large the US government is. So he has to use tactics like this to make a dent. When this doesn’t work, he’ll use a tactic like, “Everyone is fired. If you want your job back then you need to apply again.”
He thought he could fix everything overnight and it’s turning out to be a lot of work. He’s getting bored because it’s too much work. Now he is getting desperate and uses tactics like this.
I'm pretty damn sure this is highly illegal essentially everywhere in the US. You cannot decide an employee resigns. That's not legal, not even in at-will states (in at-will states this is stupid, you don't have to give a reason to let someone go, BUT, if you make it obvious it can still be judged illegal of course). If he goes through on firing someone this way he'll be paying 2 years pay up front for the people he lets go. AND give them their job back.
He’s just such a colossal prick. And I don’t mean the policy, although that is dumb. Forget about the policy for a second. Do you see leaders at major corporations posting their new rules for employees publicly on social media? No, that’s done internally. Why do it publicly then? You could just email everyone who works there. Because it’s performance. Because it’s distraction. Because it presents him in a way he likes. None of that is how real leaders operate. This is why people dislike him so much. There have always been horrible managers. Musk is just so publicly, hyperactively odious.
Out of curiosity, is this e-mail also going to FAA air traffic controls? If they don't respond, will someone escort them out of control towers and from the radar screens in regional control centres?
How about food inspectors? Will processing plants be unchecked?
Border patrol agents? Will border crossing be left unguarded? Will drug inspections stop?
I honestly wish that all the ATCs would agree together not to respond, and publicly dare Musk to fire them. Or just walk out on the job and dare Musk to replace them with Tesla and SpaceX employees.
They might be the only group of people who have that kind of leverage.
I’ve had jobs with both weekly reports and no reports, I’m highly specialized engineering as well as competitive sales roles. The weekly reports were useless. Management already knows what you’re doing, just through meetings. So the weekly reports added nothing extra, except create useless work. So it’s no surprise that someone as useless as Elon Musk would push for something like that.
Musk knows this is useless. And he knows the people responding will know they are useless. He WANTS the people sending the response emails to know they are useless and be demoralized. Musk isn't dumb, you are just assuming his goal is something different than what is actually is. His goal is to demoralize everyone who works for the government. They have stated that is the goal but for some reason people keep ignoring their works and giving them the benefit of the doubt.
It is a not-uncommon tactic from new less-than-competent managers, though usually people inclined to doing it across all their subordinates only get hired as fairly low level managers, not with authority over large organizations.
Make up some fantastic bullshit that sounds related to your job title. Hell, use ChatGPT to write it, it's not like they're going to have any humans review tens of thousands of these. They're going to feed it to Grok or whatever. Give them the same disdain and disrespect they treat you with, they don't deserve anything better.
Historically, create problems, sell solutions is the point most long-standing instutitions (media, government, business, etc) reach, and also when those institutions are undergoing rapid change (e.g. revolution) from within.
Not sure how that is relevant as the people all doing this claim to be outsiders draining the swamp. Historically the US realized that having a civil service works way better than political firings every 4 years.
Why does Musk have the authority to do this? Yeah, I know, DOGE is the new name for the United States Digital Service. Why does that give them the authority to fire government employees in other parts?
Trump says Musk has no particular official role. So how does he have the official authority to pull stunts like this?
What is the legal basis for all this? Is there even a pretend legal facade for this? Or is it just "screw the law, we'll have done 99 other things before a lawsuit on this one comes to trial"?
They did it in Clinton/Gore. They did a full perfomance review of all agencies/employees and fired and shutdown a lot. But they used congress and behind the scenes efforts. Of course social media wasn't a thing back then.
The right way to do it was what Clinton/Gore did with setting up the VP as the head of the cost cutting agency and using congress to pass laws.
As someone who is all for shrinking government this is what drives me nuts about Trump. It's like they run head first into the shit storm time and time again.
Exactly this. Downsizing the government is fine. But there are good ways to do it, mediocre ways to do it, and then there's the clusterfuck way to do it. We're experiencing the latter.
But it's clear this isn't really about downsizing the government. I really don't think Trump give's a shit about the federal budget or the size of the deficit. It's about a show of power. Trump is proving that he can be king by getting away with doing whatever he wants.
This whole thing so far seems to be predicated on the idea that the courts will let Trump do anything he likes.
I actually suspect that that is not correct. Trump’s pet justices were chosen off a list of candidates who were primarily focused on, well, screwing over women and minorities, enthusiastic for banning abortion, attacking LGBT rights, voting rights, etc.
It’s not, however, clear that they’re up for turning the US into Russia. It’s the sort of job where you care about legacy; you probably don’t want your legacy to be “ensured that a Supreme Court was not necessary going forward”, which is where this is headed if they let him do what he wants.
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.
With Nixon, Ford (AIUI) wanted the country to try to 'move on' from all the non-sense that Nixon tried to do. He was afraid that further investigations could cause more damage.
With Biden, he (AIUI) wanted to make sure that certain people (Fauci, Milley, etc) didn't have a legal sword hanging over them because they disagreed with trump. Fauci received death threats against him and his family because of his work/statements during COVID, and the government provided a security detail, which Trump has cancelled (and Fauci has to pay for himself):
The entire affair feels so infantalising, these muppets lied and cheated their way to the top, and somehow we're now expected to listen to them? Do what they say?
The media just keeps fanning their flame, every day it's something new. Goddamn YouTube algorithm tricks from the executive branch. They feed each other.
Their ego cannot be satisfied. Their ego is not a national priority. Stop talking about them, stop tweeting, everything they say gets walked back days later, it's a soap-opera; meaningless drama.
They can't invent new laws, stop pretending like they can, stop being fearful of them, just ignore them and watch them wilt. Half of you in the comments are already considering the implementation details of this as if it was a fait accompli.
If you desperately need to do something productive, work out how the opposition party has been so catastrophically ineffective for the last generation, and doesn't seem to show any signs of changing.
'Ignore the assholes' is an emotional reaction that simply does not work. It's not like school, where you can (somewhat) rely on a (quasi-) objective educator to sideline intellectual disruptors and focus on the important material.
Power, like violence, is its own argument. You can't cause an authoritarian government to wilt by ignoring it any more than you can demoralize a mugger by saying 'ha ha your punches don't bother me at all because resorting to violence means you have failed.'
I do agree with a lot of your observations, especially the general fecklessness of the nominal opposition party.
I don't think enough people realize that wealth is not about talent and hard work. It's luck. There are hard working and talented people in all walks and levels of wealth, but having the opportunity at all falls to luck, often who one's parents are. Society blames those that lack wealth instead of pulling everyone up. And they fetishize those with wealth as having more talent than others or working harder.
It's supposed to feel that way. They have clearly stated this isn't about efficiency but instead the demoralization of our government and the destruction of it's institutions (which has been their goal since the 1980s with their 'starve the beast' strategy).
The only reason some of these things get "walked back days later" is because everyone makes a whole lot of noise about them. Stop the noise and the federal government gets steamrolled.
A few days ago there was discussion on European uncertainty about US commitment to NATO, but the first thing that came to mind was that our own Pentagon better watch out because there's no way Trump could understand why it was built in the first place, or why it's worth keeping.
Now with top military leaders being kicked out, and there are bound to be escalating numbers of department heads rolling, there has got to be someone who can out-rally Trump over the next two years well enough to get Trump's followers voted out of Congress, followed by rapid justice through serious impeachment this time.
Just like Trump had himself and Junior and Vance out there during the same week lots of times, all these newly cast-off leaders need to hold hundreds of rallys per week across the country and see who rises to the top as the one who has enough real leadership ability that will put Trump and now Musk to shame. Must be able to convert Trump's voters as well as motivate the non-voters and it should be easier than ever since his mishandling is much more obvious now and millions voted for him only because there was nobody they liked better.
All kinds of government employees former or present, especially military members, need to join a new legitimate regular ordinary political party and rally more than once per week using the same populist tactics & strategies that allow non-leaders to arise in the two major parties, but without the limitations of those parties' ingrained deficiencies that keep them from getting anybody better than Trump to run. Surely there is a real leader whom a political machine can be built around, and the machine needs to start being built now, way before the ultimate choice of personality can be made. If there was one big government employee's union it might have been better for them than what they had, but wouldn't their own political party be even better? With enough experience and patriotism running the government as a career, that it could be combined and there is nothing that Trump or Musk will be able to hold a candle to, and it will show enough to convince former Trump voters to attend the new rallys precisely because they were betrayed.
Surely there are more than one suitable leader having years of outstanding service who has the charisma and now the freedom and motivation to live on paltry donations until they can snowball well beyond their respectable government salary. This needs to start right in Washington where there should definitely be a rally a day until it's packed every day and the crowd hangs on every word, cheering more so when Trump's unsuitability is emphasized. Then feed it live and get going in other cities, plus bringing some of those crowds to the rural areas too.
With undeserved perceived power the Trump administration is going into disarray faster than ever and already may not be able to reduce triggered chaos within two years. They'll be busy in the White House even more than Biden was, so it's time for everyone else to rally for years even if it's just to commiserate how much they hate Trump. That's all Trump did most of the time, was to rally those who hated Biden and spread the hate :\
For years.
The only proven tactic for the times.
Ideally there should be such a reversal that the PR gets bad enough that Trump resigns and his former followers shun him like they did Nixon.
If you had all government workers in a single party, they'd fall pray to groupthink and there would be pressure to join said party if you want to become a government worker.
This seems like an ideal way to make anyone competent leave; the only people who will stay for four years of this sort of nonsense are those who are otherwise unemployable.
I suspect the next couple of presidencies after Trump will be largely focused on putting the pieces back together (it’s far easier to break institutions than to build them).
That has been part of the republican playbook since the 80's. Leave things in a mess, so the incoming replacements have to spend their term fixing everything, rather than implementing any changes they campaigned on.
