Jeff Childers again NAILS IT …Another Giant STING Operation from Trump and Musk !

Finally, it was the most satisfying meltdown of the week. Yesterday, the New York Times ran a story that could have been a scene from Office Space headlined, “Elon Musk Tells Federal Workers to Detail Work in an Email or Lose Their Jobs.” The sub-headline explained, “Elon Musk has drawn inspiration from his 2022 takeover of Twitter with the tactic.” Predictably, all the hot takes completely missed the point

I’m gonna need you to go ahead and tell me what you did last week. Mmmkay?

The carefully choreographed rollout sequence was masterful. First, Trump posted yesterday on Social Media that, while Elon has been doing a good job, the President wished he would be more aggressive. Next, Elon tweeted agreement and said DOGE would make federal employees document their work week or be fired. Shortly thereafter, civil servants across the government got an email from the Office of Personnel Management with the subject, “What did you do last week?”

If you think this all happened because of a random Trump tweet, I’d like to sell you a very nice bridge over a key acre in the Everglades.

Just when federal workers were relaxing and thinking the worst was over, Elon’s aggressive work-audit email arrived on a Saturday morning. It was fair; the rest of Trump’s Team is working.

The brief email asked workers to provide five short bullet points listing last week’s work accomplishments no later than midnight on Monday. It did not mention termination or any other kind of discipline. (Curiously, Kash Patel told FBI workers not to respond, because FBI would manage its own staff under its own procedures, buying him instant high-T credibility within the law enforcement agency.)

Cue violent fits of outrage from Democrats attempting to defend the indefensible. It’s bullying! It’s fascist! Only Hitler would force employees to explain what work they did!

I am not exaggerating the left’s hysteria, not even a little. “The demand,” explained the Times, without any irony, “left many workers reeling.” Reeling! Many federal workers apparently have no idea how to respond to a simple, short information request.

The article reported that one anonymous NIH employee said she was “shocked” by the email, which gave her “a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach.” She messaged a colleague: “They’re terrorizing us.” I don’t think she will make the cut. That ‘sick feeling’ was probably acid indigestion brought on by realizing she didn’t accomplish anything this week.

“Personally, I’m afraid to not respond by the deadline based on Elon’s tweets that non-response would be considered a resignation,” said another worker, who added that friends at another agency “are on the fence on whether to respond with actual accomplishments or to respond with bullets of the oath we took to the Constitution.”

I suggest they pick actual accomplishments. Apparently, the irony of not working to talk about reporting work accomplishments was completely lost on them.

Everett Kelley, the federal employee union president, fumed that the request for documentation was “cruel and disrespectful.” Sam Bagenstos, a University of Michigan law professor, wondered whether asking workers to say what they did might be illegal. “This is obviously designed to intimidate employees,” he complained.

Various Democrat Senators and Congressmen sounded off about how this was literal fascism, implying that federal workers should remain perfectly unaccountable. For instance, this delightful missive from Senator Tina Smith (D-Minn.):

They fall for it every time. In the private sector, especially for remote workers —and nearly all federal workers are remote— it is completely normal to make this kind of report to management. Only entitled federal workers and Democrats believe reporting work is somehow unacceptably burdensome.

Still, everyone missed the point. The email wasn’t an accountability audit. It was a skills test. From millions of federal workers, how can you possibly determine the good ones? Which ones are the hardworking and underappreciated 20% who do 80% of the government’s work? How can you separate the diligent sheep from the grifting goats in a herd that big?

It’s easy. Give them a simple assignment on a short deadline and see how they respond, that’s how.

Consider this: what do you now know for sure about employees who responded within ten minutes of getting the email yesterday? What will you know about employees who wait until the last minute tomorrow to answer? (Or who don’t answer at all.) And that’s just what you can learn from how fast they responded.

From there, you can move on to evaluating the quality of the response, but you’ve already learned a lot. While I was writing this up this morning, Elon tweeted this:

Could there be exceptions for why someone was slow to respond? Sure. Employees in the hospital having their appendix out, or on a vacation cruise in the Bahamas, or out on the protest march over the last OPM email, or messaging other employees about how to respond to this OPM email, and so on. But the exception proves the rule; what can you learn about an employee who still responded within minutes even while on vacation?

In other words, by this morning, the Trump Administration already knows which are the critical employees who actually do all the work, and who should probably be promoted to manage their departments. Tomorrow, Trump’s team will identify a different clueless group who don’t even know they got an email yet, despite all the news and social media coverage, and who should probably be fired.

Genius. Don’t be surprised if federal workers are required to do this every week going forward. The easy days of civil service are wrapping up. The red staplers are going away. They should have taken the deal.