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Great insight, thanks.
Latest update is Musk instructing people to respond to an email or be fired:
Does Musk have the authority to (I assume) instruct agency heads to fire people who don't respond to this email? And what's the timeline for responding?
Let's assume tens of thousands of people call his bluff and don't actually respond, and tens of thousands of others just miss the email. Are they really all going to be fired, and if not, does Musk then look impotent?
Musk has no authority except what the President gives him, and the President cannot simply say "Everything Elon Musk says is a lawful order."
The President also cannot sack federal employees with tenure like this. For probationary employees it's... debatable whether what they are doing right now will hold up in court. But the civil service reforms that ended the patronage system explicitly prohibit the executive branch from simply firing civil servants at will. Congress can withhold funding and the President can perhaps abolish certain programs, but federal agencies have to follow a prescribed RIF procedure. They can't just arbitrarily fire people without cause like this.
Elon Musk sending an email saying "If you don't reply, you're fired" is absurd to the extreme. And how will that even work? Who is going to be reading the hundreds of thousands of emails federal employees send in reply? Are they going to do this every week?
It is unworkable and makes no sense. There is no way this can withstand any legal scrutiny.
That said, it appears the administration is operating on the principle of "legal is what you can get away with." Many people here seem to like this, so I can only assume those who do are operating on the assumption that Trump and his successors will never lose power again.
It was sent out Saturday night and has a deadline on Monday night. There could be people who work Saturdays and have Mondays off who will not see it until too late.
I can get behind the idea of explaining what you do and how it serves a specific directive from Congress (everyone should be able to explain this much). I have to send my boss a similar missive every week. But the way Musk is doing this seems solely for the purpose of upsetting people without thinking it through.
Doing it for your boss who you know is one thing, the point here is that you're doing it for someone a million levels above you with no context or two-way communication whatsoever. I would find it absurd to reply at all, whether I was a high or low functioning employee, so I agree with you the manner Musk is doing this is likely intended just to annoy people.
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Of course the idea of having to explain what you did this week to your boss is not absurd. Elon Musk is not the boss of anyone in the government, though, and people who won't see the email are just the beginning of why this is a stupid idea. What about employees who are on leave? Out sick? Working jobs without email access? (Lots of government jobs involve being out in the field for extended periods.) Working on classified networks? One could charitably assume that Musk intended such obvious cases to be exceptions to the "Everyone must answer by Monday midnight" edict, but he indicated no such exceptions or even awareness that such might exist. Moreover, I can only assume he intends to use some kind of AI to process these emails since he can't possibly have enough employees in DOGE to read them. On Twitter he's shit-posting about how "All you have to do is use words that make sense about what you're doing- such a low bar!" Yeah bro, so how is your LLM going to individually judge each and every response and decide if it was adequate? If it flags it as "insufficient" does a human review it, or has he set up an automated system to send out termination letters? Which I would not put past him, and which is, also, illegal, because Musk has no legal authority to terminate civil servants.
It's so ridiculous, I am starting to wonder if he is just... unwell.
Did you catch any of the "Musk ranting at the astronauts calling out his lies"
TwitterX drama last week? How about the baby mama drama?He's got to be unwell. The best case scenario is that he's irresponsibly upped his ketamine dosage or gotten sucked into other drugs but not yet enough to suffer permanent damage, if only there's someone (his mom??) who could intervene and not be ignored. The worst case scenarios are that either his genes have betrayed him ("Quite an astute engineer, although he's gone a little crazy later in life. I don't think he has all his cookies in the jar." - Elon Musk discussing his father Errol in 2008, and hopefully not foreshadowing anything) or that politics and memes alone are able to do this much damage.
As an American and a person worried about climate change, space exploration, AI, social media, etc., I think the "Musk genes just broke him" hypothesis is the most worrying one. E.g. although I'm sure Gwynne Shotwell would handle SpaceX just fine if Musk retired tomorrow, I'm not sure what would happen if he just kept spiraling intellectually while not abdicating any control.
As a fond long-time user of The Motte, I think the "politics memes alone just broke him" hypothesis is the terrifying one, even if it might not be irrecoverable. I pride myself on being able to read at much wilder places than this, both to learn about how others think and to sift through the dross for an occasional real insight ... but do I need to retreat, soon, before just a little bit more aging renders my brain vulnerable to even mid-quality propaganda? I'd like to think I'm not one of the typical engineer-brains who thinks logically about one field but drops rationality elsewhere, but I have to admit that the most straightforward rationalist take on this topic is probably still "Politics Is The Mind-Killer", and now I'm wondering how much of that title is an exaggeration for a cute Dune reference vs a literal description of what I've been watching happen to many once-sane people.
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We are operating under the assumption that the executive controls the executive and the idea for example that the president cannot send emails to his subordinates or fire them is absurd. Government sector unions should be per se illegal.
You may feel that the idea that the executive cannot arbitrarily fire any civil servant he wants to is absurd, but that is actually the law right now. Likewise, government sector unions are legal. Change the law if you don't like it. Schoolhouse Rock told me that's what Congress is supposed to do, but apparently we don't care about that anymore, so uncharted waters ahoy. My point was that the wheel turns.
Let’s challenge that in the courts. The executive power cannot be vested in the president if he cannot fire people who attempt to block his exercise of the executive power.
There might be statutes but that doesn’t make them law. Maybe you need a refund from schoolhouse rock
So your argument is that the Civil Service Reform Act is unconstitutional, and Trump should simply ignore it and do an Andrew Johnson? I mean, that's a coherent argument, but I'll return to my question about whether you are okay with the next (Democratic) president doing the same thing?
I’m saying they should do a test case. There is a difference.
I genuinely don't understand the difference you are pointing at here. The law is pretty clear, and you are saying Trump should ignore it and see what Supreme Court says?
Yes disobey the statute (different from law) which is different than “Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.” The executive is claiming the statute would be illegal and if SCOTUS agrees then the statute would not be law
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