Democrats and media have been trying to make the firing of some federal employees a "thing" in their fight against DOGE.
However, non-governmental employees aren't guaranteed a job, we are 36 trillion in debt, and now we're hearing all the many reports of fraud, waste, and abuse.
So this tactic isn't resonating well with the American people. My colleagues covered a couple of these stories.
READ MORE: The Washington Monument Syndrome: 'If You Fire That Guy, the Sky Will Fall'
On Saturday, Elon Musk made another announcement that has a lot of people talking.
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.
The announcement is likely to flip out Democrats because how dare Trump require reporting from federal workers on what they have achieved to make sure they're actually doing something?
It's not clear from Musk's tweet if this was intended to be a continuing effort each week, although it sounds like it. I imagine we'll find out more on this and it will probably be going through the various agencies.
I had prior government jobs in which I had to report every week on the status of my cases. It's just basic accountability, and maybe particularly important in government work where people sometimes think they have a job for life. This would help to ensure results and productivity. It's a great idea. Frankly they should already be doing this, if they're not.
Who could possibly question this? I say that of course knowing the Democrats will find some way to try to attack it, probably attacking the "failure to respond" counts as a resignation part. Again they will take what should be normal in the sense of requiring results into something "unprecedented."
I'm guessing if a federal worker responded by saying he went out to protest with Democratic politicians instead of doing his job, that would not be counted as a sign that they were producing results.
But then you can also tell from this kind of a measure whether what the person is doing is helpful to the overall whole of the department. If they're reporting they're doing the same thing every week, and it's never getting done, that might be a problem. You can determine whether the job is necessary and/or is the person who's supposedly doing it.
Some had fun recalling the movie "Office Space" in response to Musk's tweet.