IDENTIFIED: The Biggest Waste of US Tax Dollars So Far
[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]
It’s as if every single federal employee has been sucked into the 1999 movie, Office Space, forced to generate value-sucking and utterly-useless TPS reports just to make a goddamned micromanaging control freak happy. Via NBC News:
Billionaire Elon Musk issued an ultimatum to federal employees Saturday, saying in a post on his social media platform X that employees must respond to an email justifying the work they completed this week or resign.
Federal employees have already begun receiving an email asking to summarize their work, sources familiar with the matter told NBC News, though unlike Musk’s post, it does not explicitly threaten a forced resignation.
The email, sent from the Office of Personnel Management and shared with NBC News, asked employees to send approximately five bullet points listing what they accomplished this week, CC’ing their managers.
The email reviewed by NBC News requested that employees not send any classified information, links or attachments. It said employees must respond by a deadline of Monday at 11:59 p.m. ET.
Good luck to any federal employee who’s on leave or on vacation and doesn’t learn of this until after the deadline — or who can’t provide five fucking bullet points because their job is as simple as “fought a forest fire” or “nursed veterans.”
If this is how Musk runs publicly-listed companies, shareholders should contact the boards of directors and demand he be removed because he’s wasting their investments as well.
No need to do your jobs better, no need to add more value. Just worry about fulfilling this massive time waste.
Musk needs to be fired.
Here’s your action item: find a special election for a congressional race and help the Democratic candidate win. Keep an eye out for future special elections. Take back the House to prevent any effort to legislate this kind of massive waste of tax dollars. The GOP has a very slim margin which can be eliminated through special elections.
Then find a way to communicate to other voters they need to know about this waste and be ready to help pitch in to fire Musk.
Nobody elected a shadow king, and nobody elected this blackhole draining our taxes.
Unfamiliar with the reference to Office Space? It’s streaming on Hulu.
_________
Image by: Daniel Manrique ([email protected]) via Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0
Ugh. We were warned.
Alt Text: Bluesky post by ChrisO_wiki (@chriso-wiki.bsky.social):
Ian Fleming’s original James Bond novels haven’t aged well. For example, Moonraker – published almost exactly 70 years ago in April 1955 – features a villain who’s a super-rich industrialist and rocket-maker seeking to cause chaos because he’s a secret Nazi. Such a silly idea! ” — February 22, 2025 at 1:57 PM
Work-product related data from “a million” federal government employees + AI = tremendous value to Elon?
Dataraker.
What new data is he getting? All the bullet points could be pure bullshit. Believe me, managers and employees all know what’s going on and they’ll be communicating to complete this bullshit task in an organized fashion.
It’s not even a good approach to monetizable data collection.
At work we did a weekly meeting to tell others what we did that week. (For some people, it really was all BS.) Twenty people in a room being treated like kids in school – I hated it, especially since we had to document our time anyway.
He isn’t even in their chain of command; he really doesn’t need to know. And very few jobs can be summed up in five bullet points.
Geeezz…think that’s bad.
I once had to document within the hour what I was doing. Sometime in the 80s as I recall – must have been a McKinsey idea back then.
The there was the four day 10 hours a day thing – we were all salaried – nonsense to save overhead.
Those stupid exercises did not last long.
I also think this is about data but rather than highly monetized, it seems more like a low grade fascism personality test to me. Who follows instructions promptly, how well do they do it, and are they potentially useful in the coming future?
Good point, but is it really *just* a test of fascist personality — a person prone to authoritarian influence — or a test of those who are most prone to extortion?
Ex-1: single mom who can’t find another job easily because the job’s in a remote location and her job pays enough but not enough to fight off legal battles for custody.
Ex-2: older adult at the end of their career who just needs a couple more years to earn enough points for retirement, who likely can’t get a job elsewhere because of their age, and they’re not working in a high-paid job but something like an admin role.
Can we really call these people fascists? They’ve taken their oaths seriously and can’t speak out for fear of being fired if not prosecuted for Hatch Act violations if their statements are seen as political.
And today he says that those providing “good responses” should be promoted.
Of course, they’d be probationary in their new positions; heads I win, tails you lose.
You just got to love the numerical illiteracy in billable hours that even just READING 2.3M emails entails, to say the least about staff having to write them. And by Monday at 10am?
Pure genius, if your goal is to bring the federal government to a halt, “until we figure out what’s going on”, which is something Trump telegraphed years ago.
ETA: I also believe these knuckleheads saw the word “probationary” and assume it was disciplinary. “Sure, fire all your newest hires!” won’t work any better than “Sure, let’s retire all the oldest hires!” did decades ago.
Seems like crude villainy. From the “cc: supervisor” DOGE ends up with an org chart without having to mess with OPM or having to send DOGE bros to additional independent agencies.
I’d send a reply, BCC’d to boss, congressperson, senators, House Speaker, Majority Leader, and the WH, and ask if this unelected, unappointed, unofficial guy deserves anything more than a loud GFY from everyone.
Also that many replies are going to crash the email servers.
Ah! The Law of Intended Consequences…
Hmm. A stealth DDOS attack on the management?
So, if your job was on the line, would it take a couple of hours to do this? More, perhaps; not counting getting approval from your supervisor? And if you were a supervisor, would you be working with your team all day on Monday polishing those bullet points?
Then comes the math: Multiply the total number of employees responding times some estimate of average time spent writing those responses. You’d get a huge Total Time number.
Divide the total hours by 2080 to get the FTEs (full time equivalent/person years) to find the portion of the workforce that was diverted in order to do this useless stunt.
To wrap up front end of the stunt, multiply the average full cost of labor and benefits for those FTEs to get the one-time cost in $$$.
Then we need to calculate the administration of the debacle. Is DOGE going to process all those emails with AI – and no human intervention? (AI developed by the folks that didn’t know who actually owns the nuclear weapons stockpiles, and that Bonneville Power Administration salaries are funded by its ratepayers, not taxpayers.) What about classification? If this had happened in my last office, the civilian employees’ unclassified accomplishment summaries would probably look pretty watered down to an AI thingy.
DOGE is committing full scale classic/textbook Waste, Fraud, and Abuse. It will result in enormous costs. Exactly what Inspectors General investigate.
The question I keep hearing is: “Is this even legal”? In a non-Doge world, the HR and legal folks would be providing employees information based on the legal authority that allow (?) something like this, and also providing information on any appeals processes.
I figure an FTE is 2000 hours, with vacation time included. If not, then there’s going to be about 10 days off for holidays. (It makes the math easier, too.)
As per guidance from management on both the contractor side and the government side, my FTE estimates were to be 2080. That’s how I costed labor, and also estimated impact on FTE as the result of new training being applied to existing billets.
Ah yes, 2000 vs 2080 – the 4% difference that Emerson imagined:
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/353571-a-foolish-consistency-is-the-hobgoblin-of-little-minds-adored
My first thought was of how I use 2000 vs 2080; that leaped into whether wannabe President Trusk* views himself as the description Emerson gave of misunderstood people.
But to me this appears to be nothing more than a data collection scam by a control freak to train an AI model.
Raven Eye – for the record I use 2080 for accuracy when money is on the line at larger scale, I spend my employer’s cashish like it is my own as well as account for it for the same reason; every penny counts. Or should it be every nickel?
PJ Evans – I too use 2000 but for a different purpose – a quick back of the envelope field means for translating $/per hour into $/yearly salary. The example I give those who can catch on is they work 50-40’s; 50 weeks a year x 40 hours a week = 2000 hours.
If you make a dollar an hour you make $2000 a year. The correlation is simple – take your $/hour – double it and add 3 zeroes. $15/hr = $30K/year – $60/hr = $120K/year.
Works in reverse as well – salary: lose 3 zeroes and cut it in half. $90K/year becomes $45/hr and so on. In ’02 I had a developer in Detroit ask how much cashish I wanted per hour – told them $42/hr – they said “we can do better than that – how about $65K per year? Quick back of the envelope told me that $32 was a bit less than $42 – so I explained. Did not take long but they got me on board at the higher rate, lasted 3 years.
*Afterthought with the Trusk mash-up: any of the clever folk here think there may be an acronym to be made? Something on par with Dan Savage and the ‘santorum’ definition – a thing to jump to the top of a search algorythm?
2080 is used to calculate the hourly rate of a salaried worker including any paid time off such as vacation and holidays. It can also be used to calculate the yearly labor cost of an hourly worker if they also get paid vacation or holidays. Otherwise the number of hours they will work would be used.
2000 is often used when calculating how much work will get done for planning purposes, as no work is actually done when a worker is on paid time off.
2000 is often used to calculate FTE’s as that is often based on actual hours worked over a period of time or from forecasted hours out of a hourly loaded schedule.
You have to understand where the data comes from and how the results will be used. Which ties in perfectly as to why virtually everything the DOGE wingnuts has to be looked at very carefully.
A minor fed employee inside baseball point: most fed salaries are hourly based on a 2087 hour year. Why? I think to incorporate leap year?
Rayne, thank you for the post today, and historically for pointing out to the readers here how DARVO works. This is definitely waste. And also fraud and abuse. We hear so much about how this administration is eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse” and it’s obvious that in fact DOGE is the perpetrator. The messaging is like an anticipatory DARVO.
They’ve cost us more than they’ve “saved”.
All of this is abusive behavior — the manipulative controlling demands for hoop jumping with threats of punitive action, all of it.
The whining ahead about being victims of protests against this behavior is wholly predictable once we understand DARVO.
What about Donald? After we deduct his golfing hours, what do his answers say?
As Rayne stated above you can bet that all of trumps flying monkeys use DARVO. Putin uses darvo.
It’s really helpful to recognize the behavior as part of narcissism and anti social behavior. (At this level of abuse where lives are greatly affected, the behavior rises to anti social behavior).
DARVO stands for Deny. Attack. Reverse the victim and offender.
Once you expect the behavior and see it, it keeps you from falling into the emotion of it. It becomes a cognitive exercise instead of emotional. Helps you stay in the facts.
Ex: We aren’t firing innocent people.We are reducing waste. These people are wasting resources and not worthy of what they are paid. They are wasting tax payer dollars. They are sucking off the government.
That is DARVO. It’s predictable. Sometimes I can help a person living with this behavior avoid the brainwash or come out of the brainwash just by recognizing the pattern. It will repeat anytime you try to hold a narcissist accountable.
And in order to stay sane, and not fall into the brainwash of constantly engaging with this mind f, you can start to be effective against it. State facts. Stay out of emotion which we refer to as JEDI training. (It’s hard not to be emotional when you are being attacked verbally.) Resist and disengage.
We need more articles about DARVO. Thanks Rayne. It helps us all stay sane when we see and expect and fight back against these predictable patterns. This is how Trump will responded to literally any attempt to point out his offenses.
Totally agree. This is the sort of thing an abusive spouse or boss would do. You’re not working hard enough, prove to me what you do all day you lazy bum. Also the insinuation that you are not to be trusted to do your job efficiently. Look at the people that work directly for Elon. He has them sleeping in the office with their families so he can be sure they are working every minute of their waking hours. Keep everyone on pins and needles worrying about what will happen next. In the end, of course, does not make for an efficient, capable work force.
He thinks everyone is 20 and will work 80 to 120 hours a week, because he says so.
He’s delusional, on that.
Isn’t domestic habitation in federal offices normally illegal? (Just another another infraction?) Which brings up the subject of fed janitorial staff…what is the status of federally contracted federally contracted custodial & operations/maintenance (gov. or private) employees? I don’t wish on anyone the job of cleaning up after these marauders. I doubt they will clean up after themselves or is that why the gang brought their families?)
Many federal employees work at least 40 hours a week, and take LESS vacation than most people.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/02/21/are-federal-workers-lazy-lets-look-data/ [via DKos https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/2/24/2305886/-Trump-transportation-goon-sucks-up-to-his-true-boss-Elon-Musk ]
It is also, I think, what the jung-uns call, “a flex”.
YES…to this conversation!
Thanks All!
I definitely NEED JEDI training.
[Resist and Disengage…Resist and Disengage…Resist and Disengage…]
I’m a retired federal employee living in [redacted] now with colleagues I am in daily contact with. One is an AFGE local union leader who sent this message to his officers and stewards:
1) I appreciate the robust dialogue and info sharing but please don’t let them fill up your weekend with angst and worry – for that is their intent. seize back this weekend for yourself and family.
2) I urge you all to stay off of your gov computers and phones till you sign in at work Monday – or whenever scheduled to be back in the office (or on your next duty day if you are still approved for telework / remote work. Checking your emails when off duty can land you in trouble, because that is considered work – and it is illegal for the gov to permit an employee to work without compensation (and approval).
3) i advise you NOT to respond to or forward the email, unless and until you are instructed to do so by your supervisor / chain of command.
4) On Monday – unless we receive official USCIS guidance, I intend (in my official union capacity) to forward the email to the chief information officer and report it as a suspicious external email from an unknown source – as we have been instructed in computer security training. And will ask him to send clarification/confirmation to the workforce about authenticity.
5.) I will recommend to our national council president that he express our concern to the acting agency head and ask that she send out clarifying guidance to the entire workforce.”
Here’s another response:
Here’s something a friend shared – : I believe it was drafted with chatgpt assistance:
Dear Unnamed HR entity,
Thank you for reaching out. I appreciate the interest in my work and am happy to assist in providing the appropriate information through the proper channels.
As a federal employee, I must comply with federal regulations and agency policies regarding information sharing, records management, and security. Because my work is subject to these controls, I am unable to share it directly through this channel. However, if this request is formally submitted through my agency leadership and follows the appropriate review and approval processes, I would be glad to assist in facilitating that process.
For reference, several regulations govern the proper disclosure of federal work:
– Federal Records Act (44 U.S.C. Chapter 31) – Ensures that agency records are managed appropriately and prevents unauthorized disclosures outside official channels.
– Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) (5 U.S.C. § 552) – While my work may be subject to FOIA, its release must go through designated agency officials who assess security, privacy, and operational concerns before disclosure.
– Privacy Act of 1974 (5 U.S.C. § 552a) – Restricts the release of certain government records that may contain personally identifiable or sensitive information.
– Federal Information Security Modernization Act (FISMA) (44 U.S.C. § 3551 et seq.) – Requires agencies to safeguard information and ensure controlled disclosure of federal IT and security-related work.
– Executive Order 13526 (Classified National Security Information) – While my work may not be classified, EO 13526 underscores the importance of protecting sensitive but unclassified information.
Given these requirements, any request for federal work products must be routed through my agency’s leadership and appropriate review processes. If you’d like to proceed through those channels, I’d be happy to direct you to the appropriate contacts.
Loyally yours,
Thank you for this, it’s very helpful. I have redacted your location because I don’t want you targeted and it doesn’t matter where you are as a federal employee.
Thank you very much, Rayne. I thought too late to edit it out. You’re right.
Yes…these are GREAT. Thanks!
I’m glad that many of you are communicating.
LOL at
“suspicious external email from an unknown source” and “Unnamed HR entity”.
! LOVE it!!!
Thank you, Phillatius, for sharing this. THIS is what resistance looks like–quick, informed, creative thinking in a stressed situation where everything counts. It may not be armed combat, but it IS combat, and your friends have signaled that in a battle of wits, they have many times the force Elon Musk is bringing to bear.
A few hours ago my therapist asked what ways I knew to fight back. My answers sounded generic. This answer sounds brilliant. This and more like it–the kind of thinking it will inspire–are what we need going forward.
I think a “waste calculation” should include secondary costs as employees asking for advice from unions or lawyers, hours put in by people working on complaints, then the time court clerks and judges will spend on possible complaints and so on.
My response will be: I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well; and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. As I am bound by nondisclosure agreements, I cannot disclose anything else.
With so much of the federal workforce being unionized, I am convinced this is designed to tee up court fights that become eventual SCOTUS fights that the muskrat thinks he will win with the hope that some of those judgements are broad enough to hurt organized labor in the private sector
Jeff Bezos is also permanently hopeful for anything that can kneecap unions on his turf.
And, speaking of dying in darkness, Bezos seems to have faded away somewhat from his “kiss the ring” activities. Is he finding the prospect of a full-blown trade war (and all the accompanying side effects) getting close to touching him in tender spot?
think bezos is distracted contemplating the ways in which his rival musk will misuse all the confidential corporate and personal info he’s accessing re. Blue Origin et al.
Maybe someone explained to him how much of his income is based on stuff from Canada, Mexico, and China.
That’s why, when we heard Trump’s tariff bubbling up after his election, and the line started for the ring kissers, I couldn’t figure out why Bezos was so visible. Bezos knows exactly how his online retail companies are exposed and vulnerable — he was responsible for designing and/or approving that process.
The Amazon algorithms are tuned to direct you, whenever possible, to imported (largely Chinese) products. If you are searching for some specialized products, you often multiple functionally identical items, all the same size, with the same control layout — but different graphics, round buttons changed to oval, and an anagram brand name. You can look for a specific part repair by name, but not find it — then enter the part number and it pops up with the name you had searched for.
I’d guess those business relationships are as closely held as the Colonel’s Secret Recipe. But all of that increases his vulnerability to trade disruptions.
“Ranking Member Connolly Demands OPM Withdraw Email Threat and Renounce Musk’s Latest Attack on Public Servants”
Marcy notes that:
https://bsky.app/profile/emptywheel.bsky.social/post/3litxw6ea3k2z
February 23, 2025 at 8:47 AM
Besides the pure sadism, who’s to say whether or not the responses end up as training set grist for Musk’s AI X mill,
with the ultimate goal being to turn large parts of the Federal government into a chatbot.
Move fast and enshittify things.
Approximately five bullet points listing what I accomplished this week:
Monday 9:08am, made it to the bathroom, just in time.
Monday 9:14am, made it to the bathroom, just in time.
Monday 9:25am, made it to the bathroom, just in time.
Monday 9:52am, made it to the bathroom, just in time.
Monday 9:59am, made it to the bathroom, just in time.
The trauma is destroying my innards.
I hope this isn’t considered classified information.
Nothing says “I have no idea what you employees do” louder than an outside consultant asking them what they do. Any intelligent CEO and Board of Directors would send the fool who sent this email packing. Moreover, to send an email out on a weekend with threats of termination is abusive and sadistic.
Musk and pals have taken a chainsaw to the government work force without knowing what the work force does. This doesn’t bode well for anyone.
Evidently, Federal Law Clerks got this email. [Did they show it to their judges?]
See: https://bsky.app/profile/samlibby.bsky.social/post/3lishapzwok25
I join Anna Bower in wondering if Federal Judges also got it.
I wonder if it was sent to the Federal JUSTICES.
https://bsky.app/profile/nateraymond.bsky.social/post/3litr7sibds27
February 23, 2025 at 6:47 AM
Max Kennerly responds:
https://bsky.app/profile/maxkennerly.bsky.social/post/3litx6mvvss2a
February 23, 2025 at 8:34 AM
Mark Joseph Stern:
https://bsky.app/profile/mjsdc.bsky.social/post/3liuuzk2jgs2r
February 23, 2025 at 5:28 PM
Links to
Texas Lawbook Exclusive:
‘WHAT Did You Do Last Week?’ Texas Judges Hit With ‘DOGE Emails’
Mark Curriden February 23, 2025 [subscription required]
The uber-conservative Trump-y 5th Circuit? Is this a veiled threat regarding Musk’s corporate relocation to Texas? Not that judges can be removed by firing anyhow, just harassed.
It gets worse: Bongino to be deputy director of the FBI.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/2/23/2305763/-Dan-Bongino-Named-Deputy-Director-of-the-FBI
(Contains image of The Felon Guy’s tweet announcing it)
Toasterhead. Jeebus.
The email seems to have gone out to the entire Office of US Courts, a violation of separation of powers.
What’s interesting to me about the Texas news is that we heard about it. The Fifth would be the last circuit I would predict to go public about this, and Chief Judge James Ho the last of the federal judiciary. I may be reading too much into it, but this smacks of the proverbial shot across the bow.
Green Day was right – we are living in Idiot America. Who is going to read all 15 million bullet points – Elon? Absurd. I think the American people should demand Musk give us five bullet points of what he did last week that don’t include using ketamine, shit-posting on Twitter and/or fellating the purported President of the United States!
They’ll take a sample.
Those that they don’t like, they and their units will be fired.
This is a trivial amount of data to process.
I imagine part of this effort would be to correlate it to other large data sets they’ve probably exfiltrated. Looking for patterns in IP addresses, say, for locating leakers or doxxing employees.
https://bsky.app/profile/joshtpm.bsky.social/post/3liu2xz2xqk2k
Great post from Josh Marshall @talkingpointsmemo.com
“In late January the Office of Personnel Management (where DOGE is hosted) sent out a memo that specifically states that no employee ever had to reply to any email!
Section 4.0 Notice, Section 4.2
“The Employee Response Data is strictly voluntary. The individual federal government employees can opt out simply by not responding to the email”
(PS I see Marcy also tagged this in Bluesky)
It is also a huge waste of the time that the entire nation and all news media expend to follow this issue. It is also one more unnecessary, counterproductive and demoralizing diversion from the jobs government employees are hired to perform. If it wasn’t nearly impossible to organize, a mass refusal would call the bluff.
“I believe you have my stapler!” -Milton
The Swingline 747 was never the same after they shifted production offshore.
So true! And so sad.
I haven’t seen any explanation for the bullet points or fired ultimatum. I don’t think it has anything to do with employees accounting for themselves to management or to demonstrate anything of value to the public. I’m more inclined to think it demonstrates that muskmelon is the ringmaster of the circus and compliance to the threat demonstrates to the employees that they are nothing but his trained Monkees. The performance of nonsensical commands is the first step to complacent obedience.
He got control of notify.gov and he just wanted to play with his cool new toy and watch the world fumble about him. Nothing more
It’s a whip.
He did something similar when he bought the bird hellsite. It did not improve performance at all.
Someone online pointed out the obvious – Musk seems to have ALL the email addresses of ALL Federal employees. What’s he gonna do with that information besides harrass them?
Of course, as I recall, China hacked OPM in 2015 and got a good many if not all Federal employee data so I guess turn-about is fair play. And maybe Elon can make some $$$ by helping Xi update his data.
“1. Woke up 2. Got out of bed 3. Dragged a comb across my head 4. Found my way downstairs and drank a cup 5. Looking up, I noticed I was late” (h/t bluesos.bsky.social)
The irony is that the money saved through reduced tax revenue will be given to the rich so THEY can waste it.
It’s the Republican way.
Re Elon Musk companies — It seems he is owner (majority), CEO, AND Chairman.
And Donnie, in his mind (what’s left of it), is CEO of USA Inc now.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
If the laws and constitution don’t apply any more then ‘woke’ states (caring about somebody other than yourself) don’t have to belong to the union anymore, do they?
As soon as Donnie and his crew break free, so does everybody else.
Don’t wait for him: anticipate, do the groundwork, get ready, he doesnt’ give a ruck about you, you don’t need to gibve a fuck about him.
I would like to apologise for the typos. I didn’t spot them before the edit time ran out on me, sorry.
Lawyers with multiple accounts bill by the billable hour, logging every phone call to 0.6 hr and strategic thinking has no work product product, the client saying you are billing me for thinking, as if they’d rather you didn’t.
“Going through the motions” is a phrase that has an origin in billable hour pumping. As is “Leaf Raking” where it is called something else on the time sheet. This is not thought to be onerous. I hated keeping time sheets, but I think even a big corporate firm like Boeing had time accounting for workers on multiple projects, or answering to multiple project leaders. Break time down by project, for accounting purposes including budget checking. Likely the ones Musk will note, “wrote code” as a bullet point. Or, “debugged Cobol.” His people are for that, not federal employees, he might think. However, flip side, he is always looking for good productive coders, and he can head hunt productive people into his private sector adventures as well as getting other useful data about microtasking in different duty sectors within an agency where if workers are culled out, his advendurers can later know where to offer contracting services for things previously done “in house. “
You’re assuming that any federal employee will want to work for someone who is a notoriously bad boss.
Speaking of making America great AGAIN:
*Albert John Dunlap…The mass layoffs at his companies earned him the nicknames “Chainsaw Al” and “Rambo in Pinstripes”, after he POSED FOR A PHOTO WEARING AN AMMO BELT ACROSS HIS CHEST. It was later discovered that HIS REPUTED TURNAROUNDS WERE ELABORATE FRAUDS AND HIS CAREER WAS ENDED AFTER HE ENGINEERED A MASSIVE ACCOUNTING SCANDAL at Sunbeam Products,…Dunlap is on the lists of “Worst CEOs of All Time”…Dunlap freely admitted to possessing many of the traits of a psychopath, but considered them positive traits such as leadership and decisiveness. He was a major benefactor of Florida State University.
*”Neutron Jack [Welsh]” had a practice of ranking employees and automatically firing the bottom 10 percent every year; in Welch’s FIRST FEW YEARS OF LEADERSHIP HE FIRED MORE THAN 100,000 PEOPLE IN A SERIES OF MASS LAYOFFS AND FACTORY CLOSURES.
“Up until this point, people who had a job at a company like GE or IBM basically figured that they had a job for life. But he explicitly said that this notion was going to be a thing of the past under his watch,” Gelles says.
Many of the jobs that Welch cut were sent overseas: “We see the first great wave of labor, American manufacturing labor, going abroad, and thus begins the real beginning of serious outsourcing that would, of course, decimate America’s manufacturing base,” Gelles says.
*The spread of E. Hunter Harrison’s Precision Scheduled Railroading [PSR, creating unbearable employee working conditions, per employees and their unions] operating model across the [railroad] industry may be driven by investors and Wall Street.
But it is being implemented by a cadre of Harrison disciples from his days at Illinois Central and Canadian National.
Members of this IC-CN alumni association — many of whom attended Hunter Camp training sessions on CN — are now working in top jobs at Class I railroad headquarters as well as in dozens of field operations positions across North America.
[My Capitalizations]
Welch was a bigger problem than the morale-breaking forced ranking system. He hid the ineffectiveness of his management style by using long-term debt to cover immediate and short-term losses. He was a fraud.
Welch also contributed greatly to the degradation of the US news ecosystem by taking Karl Rove’s suggestion that GE buy NBC and use it to influence tax policy. I wonder in hindsight if he also used it to mask his shell game with GE’s debt.
NBC never recovered, either.
This may just be an attempt to cause more confusion, give Musk another opportunity to fire more people, and to see if the workers have become more compliant and willing to follow his orders. I am sure there will be more of these “tests” to come. I’m waiting for the “snitch on your colleges program”.
“Snitch on your college” made me think of Billy Crystal’s SNL sketch for Winston University (https //www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkKMxcNQSMs)
Academia has multiple arrows aimed their way so they can be cut up for parts and sold to the big guys. This includes destroying the careers of as many academics as possible. But they also want research labs and anything else that creates IP.
The all-fed employee DEIA email in the first (?) week included a line that ordered s to inform, on pain of punishment, on anyone doing stealthy DEIA. I asked if section 508 compliance for public facing documents was a prohibited DEIA activity. I never received a response.
This is getting interesting. Since FBI, DOD (sent to all civilian employees), Dept. of State, NSA, and a few other department and agency heads already sent out “stand down, do not reply, we do our own performance evaluations” messages, Monday morning will provide staff in other agencies unequivocal statements on whether newly installed secretaries and directors mean what they said about valuing all of their mission-oriented staff, or back whatever Trump tweets and Musk claims “is consistent with President Trump’s instructions”, a pretty damn nebulous claim of authority for the action.
Once I found out that the email went to all 2.3M civilian federal employees, not just my organization, I assumed no one would be reading the bullets. But, I didn’t think that AI would have enough information to be trained: these emails don’t include our position descriptions, nor our specific annual workplans. I assumed they would be processed with a form of buzzword bingo, like resumes for job applications in the private sector have been starting 10-20 years ago. I can guess at some obvious red flag words, but bonus positive words are a bit harder to reverse engineer because we have no idea of what they hope to accomplish (if they want something more than traumatizing employees). But I then realized that just over a year ago our performance management migrated from a department-specific system to USAperformance, so in theory OPM could have access to our PDs and workplans. I’m no longer quite so sure that this isn’t AI training data, and that doubt & worry might well be their desired impact..
As a recovering academic, I look at accountability (ensuring and proving no funds are mis-spent), as having diminishing returns. The marginal value theorem says that not only is too little oversight, allowing too much fraud or mis-spending, suboptimal, it is possible to invest too much in oversight, where an additional dollar on oversight only prevents or catches 50 cents of waste. We already have individual annual workplans, annual accomplishments, 6 month interim and full year performance reviews, and submission of monthly or quarterly accomplishment bullets that higher levels might use to explain and justify our program to bean counters with no relevant knowledge of what we do. Weekly bullets, even if they were low-stakes (no reason to believe these are low-stakes) are far past that optimal level of accountability.
Eschscholzia, I had just started enjoying Full Professor-hood when I got sick, 23 years ago. Even then, however, the word “assessment” had already come to dominate all work discussions involving planning–departments couldn’t hire or update curricula without some means of assessing “outcomes”; we who taught writing and literature had to quantify “results” for the sake of the very accountability you mention.
The foundation / raison d’être of this is money. I taught at a state university with a shoestring budget; 90% of state funding went to the “flagship” state school which most people know for its basketball prowess. It leveraged that basketball prowess to establish a strong academic reputation as well, partly dependent on federal funding.
Accountability essentially equals putting price tags on yourself and your work. Some of us are very good at our jobs, but not so good at putting a true valuation on what we do. Some of us are Donald Trump or Elon Musk. When the latter two seize power over the system in which we work, their values obtain. We must sell ourselves to them.
I am following Palantir Technologies stock.
It went up after November election 2024. Is trending down now.
Wandering if Elan Musk/DOGE is using any of the software provided by Palantir.
We need more transparency from DOGE in many areas, especially what software they are using to feed the data they are now steeling.
William Shakespeare, the Bard of Bluesky:
https://bsky.app/profile/shakespeare.lol/post/3liujdpmwy22k
February 23, 2025 at 1:59 PM
Well, it’s not exactly Shakespeare, but it’s very Trump: hart, farteth.
He is that bad smell on all of our shoes.
Do keep on doing what you do :-)
From As You Like It. [I didn’t know this [LOL] …just looked it up]
The Quip Modest Quarreling wordplay, courtesy of William Shakespeare.
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/rivalry-feud/quip-modest
And a rhyme with “hart” and “farteth” does sound like something he might write.
‘And a rhyme with “hart” and “farteth” does sound like something he might write.’
It does but I was thinking of Summer is a-coming in which, per the internet, is actually ‘buck farteth’.
Apparently a ‘buck’ is a male deer; a ‘hart’ is, more specifically, a male red deer. (Trying out some html there, hope it works.)
Musk is laundering data with AI to steal it.
Office Space has a great sound track including this sweet modified cover of “Take This Job & Shove It”!
The song dates itself by referring to a pay phone. Link below
Also I worked at TGI Fridays in 1987 and can confirm if you did a good job, you got a piece of “Flair” called a WOW pin.
It was a red plastic pin that said “WOW”.
Me: Can I just have a raise instead?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdYL6Ntty54
Anybody feel like this “accomplishments” exercise is to find and root out minorities?
We are talking about white bigots.