Tuesday's Titillating Absurdities: What Would You Say You Do Here?
Perhaps the most absurd episode coming out of Donald Trump’s first five weeks in office took place over the last several days, and it fully illustrates what a privileged and mostly useless class of “workers” now infest the federal bureaucracy. Overpaid, underworked, and largely devoid of professional ethics, that bureaucracy and its labor representatives seemed to explode with rage after Elon Musk and the DOGE folks sent out an all-employee memo asking them the simple question:
“What would you say you do here?”
It is a pretty simple, yet genius, question that apparently has never been asked by anyone in a position of management across the entire federal government. And really, the memo employees received was even simpler than this, asking only that each employee list five things they accomplished in their jobs over the past week:
To anyone who spent any time in the corporate world - you know in the private sector, where Dan Aykroyd’s “Ghostbusters” character famously says “They expect results” - memos such as this were a career-long fact of life. Compiling simple lists of accomplishments on a weekly, monthly, or annual basis was just part of the job. If you were in a position of any importance to the company’s success, and actually performing that job, you wouldn’t worry when your boss requested such a report from you. Quite the contrary: you’d worry whenever they didn’t because that might be a signal your services would soon no longer be needed.