Bulwark Takes - Elon Musk’s Most Asinine Plan Yet

Episode Date: February 23, 2025

Sam Stein talks the ridiculous Saturday evening request from DOGE to federal employees to send bullet points of what they have done in order to keep their job. Tip Line: thebulwark.com/tips

Hey guys, it's me Sam Stein here on Saturday night. I don't know why I do this to myself, but I couldn't pull myself away from the YouTube because some crazy shit's happening as usual on the weekend. Before we get into it, subscribe to the feed as always. So basically what's happened tonight is that Elon Musk has taken it up a notch. I didn't think it was possible, but Elon Musk has announced, actually this occurred about 2.45 this afternoon, he announced that he was going to be sending all federal employees an email. And that in that email, he was going to be asking them to list what they have done at work over the last week. Which, okay. But then it contained this line, failure to respond will be taken as a resignation,

which is a lot. That seems extraordinary. And in fact, already we're seeing legal scholars question whether that's actually allowable. There are certain laws dictating how federal employees can resign or be fired. And it seems like this might be in violation of that. Minor points. You probably would want to think about that before sending the email or before sending the tweet, but, you know, or before sending the tweet, but whatever. So I was kind of waiting around trying to figure out what was going to happen. And then this evening at like, I don't know, five o'clock, the emails came out and the subject line was, what did you do last week? Like, literally, that's the subject line. What did you do last week? It came from the HR at OPMm.gov that's the office of personal management uh and the body of the email says hey please reply to this email with approximately

five bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager please do not send any classified information links or attachments deadline is monday Monday at 1159 PM Eastern standard time. This is nuts. I just want to be clear. It's nuts for a variety of reasons. Let's start with like the least offensive reason. It's a Saturday afternoon. I know Elon likes to work on the weekends. Hey, I'm here working on the weekends too. But like legitimately, this is not an email to send on a Saturday afternoon. Just not. And then to give people a Monday deadline is whatever. That's a day and a half, two days.

But what if they're not working on Monday? What if someone is on vacation? What if they have extenuating circumstances? They don't check their email. That seems problematic if you're going to say, hey, failure to respond will result in your resignation or be considered resignation. I'm sure there's a fair number of the 2. whatever million federal employees who are not going to see the email. It just happens. Not everyone's going to catch it. People have lives that interfere. Okay, so that's one. Two, and the most important one is

you might have seen a small distinction between what Elon's tweet said and what the email said. His tweet said that if you don't respond, they would consider it resignation. The email said nothing, nothing to that effect, right? Like there's nothing in the email that says, hey, if you don't respond, we're going to consider this your resignation. Now, obviously, that's a problem because not everyone's on Twitter checking Elon's Twitter feed. Which one is the policy? Honestly, which one is the policy here?

Because if you didn't see Elon's Twitter feed and you just saw this email, you may say, oh, you know what? This is ridiculous. I'm not going to respond. What are they going to do? And they might consider an act of resignation. Now, I've emailed the White House to get a sense of which one actually is true, the email or the tweet. And as of 6, 10 p.m. on Saturday, I have not heard anything back. I think at some point they're going to have to specify this for federal employees. This seems problematic, not just on a human level, but on a legal level. Like probably need to have clear instructions to employees. I will note that the U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., Ed Martin, huge Doge Elon dude, he sent an email to his staff after Elon's email.

It says, folks, Doge and Elon are doing great work. He actually said, we are happy to be participating. Idiot. Please respond to the HR email carefully with regard to confidentiality and other duties. Be general if you need to. If anyone gives you problems, I've got your back. You're good. See you Monday, Ed. Again, nothing in that email from Ed Martin, U.S. Attorney for D.C., tells the employees that if they don't respond, it will be considered an act of resignation. That seems like not a minor detail. It seems like an important detail, right? Like, kind of matters. But maybe it doesn't, right? Like, what authority does Elon actually have here? He, according to the government's own legal filings, is not the

head of Doge. Is this a direct order? If so, from who? Shouldn't the direct supervisor have a say in who gets hired or resigns and who gets fired? What are we doing here? And didn't we just go through a week of totally random cuts that Doge pursued that then had to be reversed? Are we really going to call our federal workforce based on who actually read Elon's tweets and realizes that they need to respond or else they're going to potentially resign? I mean, it just seems insane. Now, I've gotten a lot of feedback already from federal workers. It's only been an hour.

Some of them are just like, fuck this. Like, I'm not going to respond. Some of them are getting instructions not to respond, which I don't know. That seems kind of risky. But I mean, I guess if no one responds, then they're going to fire everybody. I've gotten people who have said they are like just apoplectic. I've gotten people who say they're incredibly depressed. Notably, I got people who had signed up for Elon's deferred resignation program, the off ramp that was supposed to give them peace of mind until September.

Who got this email? So Elon's already given them a resignation, but now he's bugging them to say, what are the five things you've done and threatening them with another resignation, which I'm having trouble figuring out how this works. I had one person who said, I stared at the computer and wondered about the future of my country.

You know, this is a lot. And look, I don't know how I would respond in the circumstance, right? Like, I suppose I probably just put down five totally benign bullet points and say, here, this is what I did and move on with my life. And if I got fired or forced to resign, I think that would be ridiculous. And I fight that. But this is the issue is that it's sort of a psychological terror for workers. It's putting them in a very difficult spot where they have to figure out, you know, is this legitimate? Is this not like, do I have to respond to Elon? Do I have other things going on like that? I need to respond to other people, my direct supervisor. This is Saturday again, 5m. I'm assuming everyone

in a federal office is frantically trying to figure out what the hell this is. Probably going to the supervisors. The supervisors are like, Jesus Christ, what the hell is going on here? I need guidance. And look, I will just say this. This doesn't make Elon particularly creative or thoughtful or efficient. This is the old playbook he did at all his companies. There's nothing revolutionary or insightful about it. He's just terrorizing his workers. And he gets to pretend like this is some sort of incredible managerial ingenuity that he like terrorizes his workforce. Like, oh, you made them say what they did in the past week.

Brilliant. You know, like, no, it's stupid. This isn't going to make government more efficient. It's just going to make government less efficient. It's going to make the workplace culture less efficient. It's going to make people hate working there. And maybe that's what you want. But don't say that's in the name of efficiency. It's not. It's dumb. And it's unoriginal. You've done it

before at every company. Everyone knew this was coming. It's stupid. Also, it's not particularly well-designed. It doesn't take much, honestly, to imagine that the email that they sent out at hr.opm.gov is going to be completely inundated with internet bullshit. You know, people sending the script to the B movie and like a bunch of probably gay porn and stuff like that. I don't know how they're going to, the Doge bro is going to like go through 2.3 million emails if they get that many. We'll probably put through some AI generator and figure something out and then pretend like they fired a bunch of people. Maybe you actually try to fire a bunch of people and then that will get into lawsuits

and then we'll have to go through this whole rigmarole all over again. And all the while, real world shit's happening and a government that's supposed to help people through real world shit won't do it. I will say the irony is noted by more than one person to me, more than one federal worker to me, is that Elon is asking people to respond to these emails at the same time that Elon cannot return emails from two women with whom he's had children. They've had to go on Twitter to beg him to return emails. Can't be bothered for that, but as demanding workers give him five bullet points at work,

potentially risk resignation. All right. So here's where we get to our ask. If you are responding to this email that Elon Musk has sent out, send us your best response. Send us what you're sending. We're kind of curious. We have our tip line. It's thebowork.com slash tips. Hit us up. Kind of curious to see what they're going to get.

Kind of curious to hear what your reactions are. We will be monitoring it. Maybe do a written piece about it. Maybe read some of the best responses on YouTube. Till then, thanks for tuning in. Have a good one.