Federal Employees Balk at Elon's Demands for Five Bullet Points

But the General Public Is Not Understanding Why and It Shows

Elon’s Tweet was terse and not vague. It said that if Federal employees did not respond to an OPM email requesting five bullet points summarizing what they accomplished last week, it would be considered their resignation. Federal employees who had not yet been fired went ballistic, with consensus being “HELL NO”, and the general public, well the general MAGA -loving public, decided that this meant they felt entitled as the private sector did this all the time, that the employees were just being cry-babies. But as all things Elon during this unmitigated, unnecessary, illegal carnage being inflicted by DOGE, the MAGA-loving public does not understand the nuance of what is happening here and why federal employees are so made about this. And it has nothing to do with not wanting to be held accountable.

At it’s core, this tweet conveys that an illegal action will be taken if the employee’s did not respond (“Failure to respond…)” The problem many, if not all, federal employees faced is that they did not know what to do when the email arrived in the email in the wee hours of a weekend night, as it came among a long chain of confusion, conflicting information, changed information, absentee agency management communications (largely driven by the fact that whomever is working in OPM is bypassing agencies leadership and emailing employees directly).

The employees went online, flooding the r/Fednews and r/1102 subreddits about their confusion as things changed by the hour. They had originally been told that responses to any emails coming out of OPM were to be considered voluntary. In fact, the official email that came out did not include the “Failure to respond…” language, but at the same time did not say response was voluntary. But Elon, is his DOGE role, or non-DOGE role as the White House asserted in a legal filing last week, or his official DOGE role that Trump later said he actually had, or…well the insanity is mind-numbing.

And then agencies sent out conflicting information. TSA sent an email to employees telling them to respond. Then the DHS Secretary sent a conflicting email telling them NOT to respond. Components of the Department of Defense told employees to respond while the DHS, the the Secretary of Defense’s office told them not to respond. This confusion was rampant across all agencies of the government because OPM/Musk had never communicated with them about this.

There is one key point to make here: OPM has NO legal authority to demand agencies do something, nor do they have the authority to fire anybody. Only individual agencies have this authority.

When I see online comments that “well they work for the President and Elon works for the President, therefore they must obey every single one of Elon’s/DOGE’s directives” is just as logically bad as “God is love. Love is blind. Ray Charles is blind. Therefore Ray Charles is God.”

And yes I chose that last line deliberately because the tone-deaf blindness to everything that Elon and Trump say, whether right, wrong, or other, is the mantra they must repeat to attack civil servants who took their jobs, in most cases, to serve their country (but yes we must acknowledge there are those who took the jobs because they needed a job). I can’t count how many times the false figure that “only 6% of federal employees show up in an office to work” has been parroted by the right wing media and Trump supporters as fact, when in fact it has its origins in an online survey responded to be under 7,000 federal employees and is actually a misinterpretation of the invalid results (because of how true scientific surveys are built), turning into a lack of understanding and, once again nuance. But is sure as hell sounds good to the masses.

The truth of the federal employee revolt is that employees already are held accountable in many different ways. Employees at the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service are held to some hard and fast productivity metrics that they either meet in the probationary periods or they are dismissed. In the procurement field, we have metrics that must be met. If my 26+ years of federal service, the General Services Administration (GSA) (which is being gutted as I type) had the most objectively measurable performance standards I ever experienced in the government. If you did not meet these metrics for a certain appraisal level, you did not get that level in your evaluation.

For example, there is a mandatory system called the Contractor Performance Assessment Reporting System (CPARs). It is in this system that government evaluations of contractor performance are recorded and stored. This information is used as reference material when used and evaluated for contractors competing for new contracts.

As such, we had a metric that looked somethin like this:

— For level 3 (meets expectations), 90 percent of CPARs reports must be finalized in the system withing 120 days of contract/contract period completion.

— For level 4 (Exceeds expectations), 95% of CPARs reports must be finalized in the system withing 120 days of contract/contract period completion.

— For level 5 (Outstanding), 100% of CPARs reports must be finalized in the system less than 120 days of contract/contract period completion.

But why are they not all 100% you may ask? Because they recognize that things happen and there might be delays in getting it done, and trust me depending on your workload, it was usually almost impossible to meet that 5 level.

These types of standards appeared through out our performance standards documents. In addition, if our supervisors received negative feedback from a customer or contractor, that would be in the evaluations and we were held accountable.

Now there is an inherent problem using absolute metrics like this, and it is the exact same issue with the Elon/DOGE demand for bullet points. It is that pesky word again - nuance.

I might have a customer Contracting Officer’s Representative (COR) who, no matter how many times we call them, call their bosses, email them, email their bosses - they don’t get us the information required to do the evaluation. Because they were not part of our agency, we had no leverage to force them to do it in a timely manner (that is a discussion for a whole other time on the fatal flaws of assisted acquisition services, no matter what agency is providing them.

What happens then? Well as an 1102 with this performance standard I have to make a decision. Do I wait until I get the input needed to complete the report and miss my performance standard or do I just create a general “Satisfactory” report across the board and notate that “no other level rating was appropriate as the COR did not provide input to support a higher rating.” If the latter, I can say “well I met my metrics” but at the same time the contractor was done wrong. But hell, I was held to a standard.

What the MAGA-loving public does not understand is that their are systems in place at the SSA and IRS that show exactly what the employees have or have not accomplished. That is easy because their jobs lend themselves to that kind of measurement. And they don’t have time to it back and come up with 5 bullet points for someone outside of their organization of what they “accomplished last week.”

What about doctors, nurses, technicians, nurse practitioners working in the VA hospitals? Are they really expected to stop their care for patients to come up with five bullet points for a non-value added data call.

Yes data calls, the bane of our existence, the bane of anybody’s existence in any organization. We hate them because we have to stop doing our actual jobs to respond to them.

Pretty much universally in the Government, the data calls flow down through an agency chain of command to the appropriate level to be responded to. For the most part these involve request for information that are nuance free and easy to report. Other times they require time to add information to provide that - wait for it, wait for it - nuance that is not captured with the raw data. And this takes us away from actually doing our jobs.

Which brings us back to the Elon/DOGE respond or be fired five bullet point data call. Asking us for information we already provide our supervisory chain either through daily or weekly reports, status meetings, etc. This allows for nuance to be addressed.

Five bullet points captures no nuance and there are times when I might only have one bullet point. Here is an example.

Suppose I work in procurement for the Department of Defense and my whole week was spent hunkered down writing a pre-negotiation business clearance for an $2 Billion ACAT-1 contract. I had barely enough time to come up for air, pee, and grab a bite to eat as I had a deadline to get it in for review as it had to go to the secretarial level (SecArmy, SecNavy, etc) for approval.

This email demand from Musk wanted simple bullet points from 2.5 million employees. No detail, just bullet points because Elon cannot process nuance and detail.

As such, my single bullet point would be:

"-- Wrote pre-negotiation business clearance for approval to enter into negotiations with under <ACAT 1> program"

Just that, because any other information would be considered Controlled Unclassified Information. But you can bet your bippy I spent more than 40 hours that week on that document.

Yet without the context my actual management chain has, Musk, his DOGEites, and maybe even you would say "He only worked on one document? He is obviously underemployed. Fire him!"

Because like much of the information Musk is putting out there, it is riddled with problems as there is zero context, just raw numbers.

Government employees are accountable to get their jobs done and report to their management chain as required, with many offices requiring weekly, even daily from teleworkers, status and activity updates, because they are being held accountable. They do these because that is part of the job part of the deal - reporting to our supervisory chain of command.

They do not like having to do separate data calls from someone with no legal authority to do this (take a look at the actual DOGE charter in the executive order), keeping them from actually getting their work done, and not knowing how the data was to be used. You know, a funny little thing called transparency.

Finally think how much manpower was wasted this weekend and yesterday by employees at all levels trying to figure out what to do with this demand…

…only to find out it was a "just kidding!" from Elon…

…followed up by Elon saying “President Trump may give you second chance to respond, so you better take this one seriously.”

For the love of all that is good and holy Elon, just run these things down the chain as they should be and you will get what you want. But make sure you have the legal authority first.

And maybe, just maybe, of you treated employees with just a modicum of respect in this process, they would not want you to, as I have heard many people say, “take your right-wing, Nazi loving, apartheid sympathizing, illegal alien ass back to South Africa” so badly.

’Nuff said!