Ever since the second innings of Donald Trump’s presidency began, Elon Musk has been involved with federal matters more than ever. The billionaire has been given his own department that goes by the name Department of Government Efficiency and aims at cutting down wasteful costs so that taxpayers’ money can be put to better use.
However, most of Musk’s decisions have appeared as rather bizarre and have negatively impacted employees’ lives. For instance, recently the USAID has come under Trump and Musk’s wrath and the agency saw the firing of more than thousands of employees and a number of others were put on administrative leave.
Keeping in line with his meaningless and authoritarian moves, Elon Musk had sent an email to federal employees last Sunday that had asked them to make a five-bullet points list detailing what they had achieved over the last week.
The email, which was sent from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) read “What did you do last week?” The question seemed rather bizarre and unnecessary and therefore, a lot of the agencies including the FBI and the Department of Defense had asked their employees not to pay any heed to it.
However, this did not sit right with Musk for obvious reasons and he took to his own social media platform X to show his disappointment. He said, “The email request was utterly trivial, as the standard for passing the test was to type some words and press send! Yet so many failed even that inane test, urged on in some cases by their managers. Have you ever witnessed such INCOMPETENCE and CONTEMPT for how YOUR TAXES are being spent? Makes old Twitter look good. Didn’t think that was possible.”
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Though he could not really do anything to those employees who chose not to respond, his anger was clearly visible and as if to satisfy his own ego, he went ahead and said, “Subject to the discretion of the President, they will be given another chance.” Further adding, “Failure to respond a second time will result in termination.”
Elon Musk’s tendency to ask for the work update of a week seems to be an old habit because when he had acquired Twitter back in 2022, he had the same question for the then CEO Parag Agrawal. In a text sent in April 2022, Musk had asked Agrawal, “What did you get done this week?”
He seems to enjoy his position of power over people and according to him, keeping an eye on their constant moves can be a good productivity booster, though often the opposite has been proved. Having a boss who constantly micromanages and asks for updates that have no real relevancy or requirement often brings down the morale of the team, which hampers productivity.
However, Musk is not the one to budge and since he had already made the threat of termination to the employees who did not respond to the mail, he is determined to follow through with it.
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Unsurprisingly, Elon Musk took the name of Donald Trump to get on with this idea of giving the federal employees a second chance at responding to him. He said, “Consistent with President @realDonaldTrump’s instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week.
He also mentioned, “To be clear, the bar is very low here,” Musk wrote. “An email with some bullet points that make any sense at all is acceptable! Should take less than 5 mins to write.”
This shows how obsessed he is with getting those updates. It now remains to be seen how the federal employees respond to this second chance and what moves Musk has planned post that.
