The email heard around the world

What began as an obvious stunt, turned into a trap when it was revealed intelligence officials have the time to discuss castration on government systems and, apparently, the entire government can be thrown into chaos by a simple request.

In the annals of American history, perhaps few things are more emblematic of the absurdity of the current era than the controversy surrounding a simple request of government employees to provide five bullet points describing their accomplishments in the past week.  To those of us in the private sector, someone in leadership asking an associate how they spend their time, whether their efforts have been productive, and given 48 hours to do so is commonplace.  It’s the sort of thing we do on a regular basis, whether weekly, monthly, or at times even daily depending on our boss.  To the government, Democrats, and the mainstream media, however, the request was the most insane thing they’ve ever heard, plunging the entire government into chaos and confusion the likes of which we haven’t seen in decades, if not longer, and possibly even illegal like everything else they do not like is these days.  Such as it is, the story began late last week when Elon Musk posted on X, “Consistent with President @realDonaldTrump’s instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week…Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”  The final email didn’t even include the ultimatum, reading only, “Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager.  Please do not send any classified information, links, or attachments.  Deadline is this Monday at 11.59 pm EST.”  Admittedly, when I first read about the request last weekend, it felt like something of a political stunt.  The request was simple and the desired outcome obvious, but there are over 2 million federal employees.  Did anyone reasonably believe a man as busy as Mr. Musk planned to read every response and review every bullet?  It did, however, have the obvious implication that many in the government might not be engaged in productive work in the first place, and if asked this question by their direct superior, would be unable to provide a reasonable response.  We saw something of this before the email was sent out, when newly minted Small Business Administration Administrator, Kelly Loeffler, posted a viral video at SBA headquarters where she appeared completely and totally alone in a vast, empty building, walking through cubicles that could have been abandoned.  “It’s my second day here at the SBA,” she said in a post that had garnered almost 20 million views to date. “I could not be more excited to be here. So, I thought I’d take a walk. And what I found is that exactly what’s been said is true. About 90% of our employees are working from home. Well, that ends Monday with President Trump’s order to return to work.”  Sure enough, Mr. Musk himself noted on Monday morning that the email was simply a check to see if federal workers “had a pulse.”  The question was whether they were “capable of responding” at all.  “This was basically a check to see if the employee had a pulse and was capable of replying to an email,” he said.  “This mess will get sorted out this week. Lot of people in for a rude awakening and strong dose of reality. They don’t get it yet, but they will.”  Elsewhere, he noted the emails were a “very basic pulse check,” adding that the response was to make sure workers had “two working neurons.”

The stunt, however, immediately turned into a political trap. As though the government itself was intent on proving they haven’t a single such neuron, leadership in several departments, though none of whom appear to have been appointed by Mr. Musk’s boss, President Donald Trump himself, immediately began contradicting the request, taking it literally rather than encouraging their own employees to demonstrate their value.  “The State Department will respond on behalf of the Department. No employee is obligated to report their activities outside their Department chain of command,” an email late Saturday from the acting undersecretary of management read.  “Due to the confidential and sensitive nature of the Department’s work, DOJ employees do not need to respond to the email from OPM,” a similar Justice Department email written by “leaders” according to CNN instructed their employees. “If you have already responded to this email, no further action is needed.”  “When and if required, the Department will coordinate responses to the email you have received from OPM. For now, please pause any response to the OPM email titled ‘What did you do last week,’” Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness Darin Selnick said in a statement.  The Department of Health and Human Services informed employees on Sunday that they should participate, then asked them to “pause” activities later that same day.  Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health, and the Food and Drug Administration, which are all part of Health and Human Services mind you, had already been told to wait until Monday for additional guidance, on what given the simple nature of the request is unsure.  To be sure, a few agencies were happy to participate.  Ed Martin, an interim DC US Attorney wrote on Saturday, “We are happy to be participating.  Please respond to the HR email carefully with regard to confidentiality and our duties. Be general if you need to. If anyone gives you problems, I’ve got your back. You’re good.”  The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau likewise encouraged their employees to respond, though they had to clarify that the request would not apply to workers whose jobs had been paused as a result of a prior executive order.  “CFPB Leadership understands that certain work tasks have stopped. If you were not able to perform tasks/work as a result, you may reply and simply reference that you were complying with the current work stoppage.”  As far as I can tell, the only official Trump-appointee who pushed back on the request was FBI Director Kash Patel, who informed employees to “hold off on responding to the email. Patel said the bureau would be handling responses to OPM’s request and would be coordinating employee reviews that align with the FBI’s procedures,” according to The Hill.

In a more rational world, this sort of response, where the amorphous “leadership” of several agencies, the great majority of which were not appointed by the President, are actively complicating if not undermining a request that was presumably approved by the head of the executive branch, President Trump, would be seen as proof of the need for it in the first place.  If the government doesn’t feel their workers are capable of responding with five bullet points in 48 hours, what are they capable of?  Sadly, our world is no longer rational, far from it.  Democrats and the media responded instead with instant outrage at the suggestion government workers should be required to write an email justifying their existence, insisting that the entire government was thrown into chaos up to and including people who could no longer work as a result of the request.  The Associated Press, supposedly an objective news organization, claimed that Mr. Musk had “roile[ed] the federal workforce with demands and threats.”  The BBC insisted there was “confusion over Musk’s demand that federal workers justify their jobs.”  NPR noted that it had stoked “confusion and anger among federal workers.”  CNN has devoted several articles to the topic, quoting federal workers who claimed “‘It’s bedlam’: Federal workers left in limbo as clock ticks down to Musk’s email deadline.”  They began this particular piece of journalistic excellence, “Federal workers spent Monday trying to figure out how – or even whether – to respond to Elon Musk’s weekend email blast telling them to explain their work last week or risk losing their job.  A day of confusing and often contradictory guidance left many federal workers still unclear ultimately how to handle Musk’s request. Some were told to comply, others were advised not to, and still others were awaiting instructions from their agency’s leaders until late in the day.” “Our chief said it was mandatory. Then OPM said it became voluntary. Then I guess Trump just told us it was mandatory again,” explained one career employee with the Department of Veterans Affairs. “No one knows who is in charge and who to listen to,” as though drafting a five bullet point email were some kind of Herculean task requiring years of training and direction.  Why not just write the freaking email anyway?  Isn’t that a pertinent question?

That this minor, rather self explanatory, answer could’ve easily resolved all the chaos didn’t prevent CNN from continuing, quoting another employee who said “Today was crazy.”  “The chaos began Saturday not long after a mass email from OPM landed in the inboxes of federal workers across the country. Work was disrupted in some agencies as staffers and officials sat in on hastily assembled meetings and tried to decipher a multitude of emails. Agency heads debated how to respond to Musk’s demands, several sources told CNN.”  “Today was crazy. A lot of people were coming in from being off to try to send an email, a silly email that doesn’t even make any sense to us,” explained David J. Demas, a union official who apparently never heard of someone actually explaining what they do for a living and who received 30 thirty whole phone calls and “also woke up at 3 a.m. Monday to find three text messages and 10 emails from worried members.” The horror!  Can anyone imagine the strain?  Similarly, an employee at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration claimed the request had overloaded this team so much, they couldn’t do any other work, telling CNN they “haven’t done any of my actual duties due to the email and having to respond to those below me and trying to get clarification from those above me.”  “That’s all time taken away from patient care,” echoed an employee at the Department of Veterans Affairs.  “It’s totally disruptive.”  At the IRS, however, some rather incredibly considering the horrified, over-stressed tone of the rest of the coverage, found the time to joke about it, where a group of employees came up with a satirical response, claiming they’d “fought the BS you started, kept the employees from beating up their managers, kept your equipment in a working condition without it being thrown against the damn wall, helped the employees understand that this was the new administration’s decision and not management,” and “trying to minimize the fear, confusion and anger you cause for NO REASON…DURING TAX SEASON!”  (Question CNN should have asked, did they not get the irony that having the time to mock the request undermines their entire all caps claim about tax season?). At the Department of Housing and Urban Development, they somehow found the time to produce videos mocking President Trump and Mr. Musk and display them in public, one featuring a video of the President kicking Musk’s toes, emblazoned with the phrase “Long Live The Real King.”

Perhaps most incredibly, unions representing federal employees threatened to sue over the request, claiming it was outright illegal to ask.  Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees wrote a letter to Charles Ezell, acting director of the Office of Personnel claiming that the federal government had no legal authority to make the request in the first place, much less fire anyone.  “The email fails to identify any legal authority permitting OPM to demand the requested information. OPM’s actions conflict with laws delegating the authority for the management of federal employees to their respective agencies and do not comport with OPM’s own regulations and guidance.”  As if there was any doubt Mr. Kelley’s primary purpose was political, knowing the letter would be made public, he bizarrely demanded an apology for asking what government employees should probably be doing already, and somehow found time to take a shot at Mr. Musk.  “By allowing the unelected and unhinged Elon Musk to dictate OPM’s actions, you have demonstrated a lack of regard for the integrity of federal employees and their critical work,” he wrote without irony himself given that if the work was so critical, there wouldn’t be so much consternation in asking for a description of it in five bullets.  Others in the same union were also in on the action, acting as though being asked to describe what you do for a living was among the most radical ideas ever.  “If you’re a VA surgeon, you know, I’ll use that example, and you’re, you’re taking care of our veterans every day, and now you’re asked, ‘Hey, I’ve got to tell you what I did last week,’ you know, and it’s not my supervisor who’s asking, it’s not my agency who’s asking. It’s just some, you know, unnamed central source. It’s really demeaning. And, you know, it’s clear it was an unserious and sort of bullying tactic,” explained Rushab Sanghvi, general counsel for the union, bizarrely pretending that Mr. Musk as directed by President Trump are unnamed sources, as though they weren’t among the two most famous and recognizable people on planet Earth.  If there was any doubt this is what President Trump himself wanted, he told reporters that the idea was “ingenious.”

In the greatest irony of all, however, one that sums up the situation better than the greatest satirists in human history, the need for an email like this to wake the government up – even if it amounts to bullying – became more than apparent as another story broke on Monday that made empty offices at the SBA look like merely a minor problem in the grand scheme of things.  This time, we learned how intelligence employees were using a government chatroom to discuss pornography.  Writing for City Journal, Christopher F. Rufo and Hanna Grossman revealed “The NSA’s Secret Sex Chats” where “Intelligence officials maintained a chatroom to discuss polyamory and transgender surgeries.”  Though “All NSA employees sign agreements stating that publishing non-mission related material on Intelink is a usage violation and will result in disciplinary action,” according to a press official, the actual logs of this system the two writers discovered “dating back two years, are lurid, featuring wide-ranging discussions of sex, kink, polyamory, and castration.”  Apparently, the removal of the penis and its transformation into an artificial vagina as part of transgender surgery was a hot topic over this period.  “[M]ine is everything,” said someone who claimed to have undergone the surgery.  “[I]’ve found that i like being penetrated (never liked it before GRS), but all the rest is just as important as well.” Another boasted that the surgery allowed him “to wear leggings or bikinis without having to wear a gaff under it.”  [G]etting my butthole zapped by a laser was . . . shocking,” said one official after having hair removal surgery. “Look, I just enjoy helping other people experience boobs,” someone else claimed about estrogen treatments. “[O]ne of the weirdest things that gives me euphoria is when i pee, i don’t have to push anything down to make sure it aims right,” a Defense Intelligence Agency employee added.  For better or worse, this seems like the right place to end after the email heard around the world.