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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   38705 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 2025

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We can use observed evidence to distinguish between the two scenarios. Did OPM have the authority, either formal or practical, to ask for this? Is this normal or unusual?

Well:

Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) staff were initially told to reply but then received a Sunday evening email asking them to "pause" responses pending additional guidance. Late Monday, a third email told employees, "There is no HHS expectation that HHS employees respond to OPM and there is no impact to your employment with the agency if you choose not to respond."

That includes the State Department, where a senior official told staff that the department would respond on its own behalf, according to a screenshot of the communication obtained by NPR. "No employee is obligated to report their activities outside their Department chain of command," the official's email said.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright also asserted his department's authority to manage his staff in a message to employees on Sunday that NPR has seen. "The Department of Energy is responsible for reviewing the performance of its personnel and will conduct any review in accordance with its own procedures," Wright wrote. "When and if required, the Department will provide a coordinated response to the OPM email." His email used identical language to a message sent by the Defense Department the same day and also seen by NPR.

Some of the most high-profile federal agencies ended up bucking Musk’s demands, with the Justice Department, State Department, Pentagon, FBI, Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Energy all telling staff not to respond to the email.

Elon Musk, who recently threatened federal workers with termination if they did not respond to an email asking what work they completed in the last week, said Monday workers who did not reply will get another chance to do so at President Donald Trump’s “discretion”—the latest development over the emails after a growing number of agency heads, including Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard, told their employees not to respond.

I don't think you'd see this if this wasn't unusual and strange.

Also, the thing where Elon tweeted people would be fired for not responding (and the recent second chance), but that wasn't actually in the e-mail - and the combination of Elon's threat of firing, the ambiguity about his power to do that as the leader of DOGE, and the shifting and differing guidance in replying between agencies - is terrible management, and I think demonstrates that Elon does not have a careful plan and is not acting with a huge amount of competence in this case. He's not acting like a strong leader, he's not establishing that his orders are followed - he's creating an image of someone who's a bit unstable, who's lashing out, claiming more power than he actually has. If you actually want Elon to control the government, stuff like this doesn't help!

I vaguely recall one of our resident military folks (maybe it was Hlynka, which would be sad) who had a fantastic post about some stories or lessons or what-have-you, and it had a line that stuck with me about one of the most important lessons of leadership: "Never give an order that will not be followed."

It's a multi-agent environment (Hlynka watch, even if Hlynka didn't make the above-referenced comment), and it's exceedingly difficult to force people to follow such an order. You end up having to go pretty over the top on it, which really ends up causing problems. And even if you don't, the mere giving of an order that will not be followed displays that you are completely out of touch with the reality on the ground. Whether or not that reality is "good", you are out of touch with it. Subsequent orders will absolutely be interpreted through a lens of, "...yeah, but this guy's out of touch and doesn't have a clue about how things work or what's going on."

I miss our resident soldier.

But yes unless there’s a bigger PR game at work, this seems foolish.

I vaguely recall one of our resident military folks (maybe it was Hlynka, which would be sad) who had a fantastic post about some stories or lessons or what-have-you, and it had a line that stuck with me about one of the most important lessons of leadership: "Never give an order that will not be followed."

This?

https://www.themotte.org/post/499/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/102547?context=8#context

That would be the one. Thanks!

I recently left pricate industry to go work in the government (DoD specifically) for the second time in what is legitimately the most important job I've ever had. I've always worked in research and tech, so government is a big pay cut, but I also really like what I'm doing, and I like that work doesn’t take over my life even though I'm legitimately contributing a lot.

My issue with this whole thing is this:

First, everything I work on is classified. Sure, I could come up with some unclassified bullet points like "developed Python codes", "worked through mathematical problems", "investigated some API's, fou d other data sources", "worked through more complicated math when the first approximation wasn't good enough", but what is this proving? How does it show my job is necessary or valuable?

Second, my boss, my bosses boss, etc. up my chain of command know what I'm working on and they're all impressed. Are my five bullet points going to be used to somehow override theor judgment of me? We al we already have to do evaluations at work. We do self evaluations and our managers evaluate us. My evaluations are really high. They always have been in every job I've had. Why the fuck do I have to send 5 bullet points to Elon Musk and be subject to some randos judgment based on that?

Finally, I read a news article that said AI is going to be used to determine which jobs are necessary based on these bullet points. I'm not sure what the source is on that--maybe it's wrong. It seems likely to me, though, because there's no way they're going through each email by hand. Again, fuck that. My job is legitimately important, for reasons I can't talk about here.

For all the complaints I see here about federal beurocracy and waste and the cold, methodical nature of beurocrats, I have to wonder, what is thay based on? Federal offices are just, like, normal work places. And the people who work there are normal people, who would be very unlikely to enact some conspiracy of hiring fake employees, faking vasge swipes, faking timecards, etc--no more likely than anyone else, certainly.

One more comment: In my previous industry job, we got a new CIO at one point. He really liked my boss, who he promoted to a position directly below him, and she knew how valuable I was, and so the CIO ended up really liking me as well. He put me in charge of some stuff, and I talked to him semi-regularly.

The problem was, he had no idea what he was doing. He laid off all our middle management in tech, which a year later we still hadn't recovered from. He snatched up tons of people who were laid off from Amazon, Google, etc. bloating our AI/ML. He decided he wanted us to move off the cloud and develop tech that we could sell to other companies, even though it wasn't a tech company.

He started canceling contracts with vendors. Firing contractors. Building on prem systems. I had VP's and their assistants screaming at me that we were blowing things up and I had to change the CIO's mind. . . But of course, i couldn't do anything. High up people started quitting.

At one point (this wasn't actually his fault), I was trying to requisitions funds for a project I'd veen told to start, which involved keeping 3 contractors who did very important work on our financial syatems. I argued and fought but finance kept telling me we couldn't keep the contractors, even though they were the only thing preventing another group of external contractors from pushing changes that would routinely destroy our payroll systems.

Anyway, long story short, I quit that job and came back to the federal government. I'll be damned though if it isn't starting to feel like a repeat of the same situation.

Isn't this just Musk's intention? I'm sure he could do it in a more orderly fashion if he wanted but that wouldn't express his disruptive intent and contempt for bureaucracy as clearly. The version of reality where everyone instantly obeys him without checking with their bosses is what he's working towards I suppose but it will require employees who check their brains at the door and have a clear loyalty to a single leader rather than a line manager, job function or their own ideas about their job. (Cough, fascist.)

If Musk's goal is to "express his disruptive intent and contempt", or to translate - get a lot of attention on Twitter X.com for being based and owning the libs - he is certainly accomplishing that. I would hope Musk would have greater goals though. This is all beneath him.

Is it? If I imagine myself in a random federal employee's position, the events around this email would make me update towards "it's safe to ignore Musk and proceed as usual". Organised people who are methodical in prosecuting their grudges are scarier than cholerics with limited attention span who randomly lash out - if you just give the latter enough to lash out at, eventually they will just start swinging their arms wildly without hitting anything.

The catch is that he doesn’t have to score a direct hit to make people miserable. If I’m fired, even if I know it’s illegal, what’s my recourse? Months of lawsuit while half the country jeers at me. Maybe years, depending on how thoroughly Trump stalls the courts. In the meantime I’ve still got to eat.

I agree that it’s less threatening than waking up one morning to find Hans Landa was running my department.

Musk needs a good woman. Jiang Qing or lady Macbeth would clean all that right up.

I'm thinking Agrippina the Younger or perhaps Laodice I would be more suited for him.

Yes, wouldn’t it be scarier if Musk focused on only one agency, established sort of a protocol/playbook to clean it up and then moved to the next? Currently this looks like a scatterbrained approach.

Maybe, but on the other hand it might give the next agencies in line some time to prepare their resistance. It's quite clear that this is not and was never going to be a cooperative effort, the agencies involved, at the levels below the president selected heads, were going to fight tooth and nail. In that context, keeping ambiguity as to who is going to be "attacked" has value.

On reflection I'm inclined to change my mind and agree with this and the post before. I do think doing it this way signals his allegiance clearly (he sees the whole of government administration as the enemy). And if he were to simply fire everyone who didn't reply, THAT would create an incendiary effect. But I agree the message currently being sent is that his main objective is just getting attention.

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