I am, to put it mildly, far from a fan of Elon Musk. His bizarre tweets purporting to “delete” USAID and the Consumer Financial Protection Board with the stroke of his pen show his complete unfamiliarity with our democratic institutions and separation of powers. His focus on USAID and on benefit fraud at SSA, targeting two organizations that primarily aid people of modest means, are highly distasteful coming from the richest man in the world.
Nonetheless, I actually at least somewhat like his effort – which has been attacked by federal employee unions and some congressional Democrats – to get feds to write down a list of five accomplishments from the last week.
I am guessing many federal offices do this already. Most organizations have regular meetings between the boss and senior staff, and periodic all-hands meetings between the boss and staff. When I was in government and led such meetings, one of their major features was going around the table (or asking in front of a larger group of staff) asking people what they were doing, what their accomplishments since the previous meeting were, and what problems they were facing or needed help with. Doing such meetings each week provides a useful occasion for employees to report on what progress they are making towards reaching their goals. I assume that many federal offices do what I did. This is, in my view, a good practice – both to get information and to remind staff of the importance of working diligently to advance the agency’s mission.
I am also guessing that this good practice is not universal in government offices. So I therefore approve of trying to spread it. I like even more Musk’s follow up announcements that he wanted the employee’s supervisor to be cc’d on the emails and for employees to develop such a list of accomplishments not just this one time now, but every week. These two steps mean that it will be easier for supervisors to get such information and to receive it on a regularized basis, giving supervisors a greater ability to manage their employees. I wish that federal employee unions had not reflexively attacked Musk’s idea, which only fuels the view that they don’t really care very much about getting government to do a good job.
Having said all that, Musk wouldn’t be Musk if he didn’t put a negative and punitive gloss on the effort. He wants to apply AI to analyze responses to the accomplishments emails to determine which employees are doing “mission-critical” work, so others can be targeted for being fired. He stated that his effort was necessary because, “a significant number of people who are supposed to be working for the government are doing so little work that they are not checking their email at all!” His contempt for our public servants is sickening.
If Musk’s activity, however ill-intentioned, provides an occasion for at least some feds to remember why federal offices exist, that their work should indeed be about accomplishments and achievements, that is a good thing.