Federal employees are about to get another email from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. It isn’t clear what the email will say, but they will be sent on March 1, according to a “person with knowledge of the situation” who spoke to a prominent Washington newspaper on condition of anonymity. The previous email to government workers – a simple request that they respond with five bullet-pointed summaries of tasks they completed in the past week – was met with howls of indignation. This second attempt to get some accountability from the bureaucratic class will reportedly have more teeth, so to speak, in terms of consequences for non-compliance.
Last time around, the emails did not come directly from DOGE but from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which, as the name suggests, is the federal government’s human resources agency. OPM does not have the authority to hire and fire. According to the individual who revealed the news of this second wave of emails, the next batch will be sent out by the various agencies themselves. Thus, the repercussions of refusing to respond to whatever request the communications might contain are potentially more serious.
Essentially, those who ignore the emails are not merely defying OPM or DOGE but the heads of the agencies for which they work.
Facing backlash for the first round of these requests, Musk described them as a “pulse check.” It seems the real goal was to figure out whether the recipients of these emails were real employees of the government – doing the actual jobs for which they had been hired.
In a normal world, it would seem insane for the people in charge of government to feel the need to determine how many of its employees were real people with real government jobs. As DOGE has already discovered, though, the administrative state is riddled with fraud, waste, and abuse. Referring to the roughly half of all federal employees who received the previous email and did not respond, President Donald Trump mused, “Now, maybe they don’t exist.” He added, “Maybe we’re paying people that don’t exist.”
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Certain media outlets have observed that Trump has presented no evidence to support that idea, but is it not fair to say that no response to a simple and entirely undemanding request might indeed be evidence that at least some paychecks are being distributed to fictitious employees? If dead people can vote – and it has been established that, in some cases, dead people have voted in various elections – then perhaps some dead people are drawing government paychecks.
There’s another more likely scenario. As the COVID-19 pandemic instilled panic across the globe, thousands – perhaps tens of thousands – of low- and mid-level government employees in administrative positions were instructed to evacuate the office and work from home. A great many of them have been working remotely ever since.
Given the bloated and inefficient nature of the massive glacial federal machine, within which so many office positions are probably duplicating tasks being completed by others – is it not possible that some employees took private-sector jobs without resigning? Is it that much of a stretch to suspect that at least a few hundred government pencil-pushers and rubber-stampers across the country have, in fact, been working nine-to-five jobs out in the real world, occasionally checking in with their agency supervisors and drawing a federal paycheck?
The Trump administration, armed with the findings from DOGE, is anticipated to initiate another wave of layoffs across the federal bureaucracy within days. Employees who may indeed have been moonlighting – along with those who couldn’t find the time to answer a basic DOGE request but did have time to make a TikTok video to complain about it – may find that their next government email is also their last.