Department of Government Efficiency head says he wants to test whether federal employees are ‘capable of replying to an email’

Summary

Elon Musk admitted that his mass email to federal employees demanding weekly accomplishment reports sent to him or risk termination was a test to gauge responsiveness.

Musk tried to frame the move as a “pulse check” on bureaucrats.

The email caused confusion, with some agency leaders advising staff to ignore it, while others initially instructed compliance before reversing course.

A rift emerged as top officials at the FBI, Pentagon, State Department, Department of Homeland Security, and Department of Energy openly defied Musk’s directive, highlighting tensions within the administration.

  • bean@lemmy.world
    25·
    11 hours ago

    I wonder how much money that accounts for. Sounds like this unelected ketamine fueled fuckwit is wasting government money. I hear there is an efficiency department now, someone should report him for excessive waste of public taxpayer funded money.

    • IsoKiero@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      6·
      7 hours ago

      I wonder how much money that accounts for

      Let’s throw some numbers around. Quick google search says that federal workers make $35/hour on average and that there’s about 3 million workers. Let’s be generous for Elmo and say that only half of the workers received and/or reacted to the email and that they only spent an hour on responding, attending to meetings with colleagues and so on about the case.

      So, 1.5 million hours * 35 dollars per hour equals to cool 52,5 million. Adjust numbers on how ever you like. 50-200 million is a big pile of cash, but in the US government scale that’s not much above a rounding error. Pretty hefty bill anyways from a single email sent by a guy whose authorization on anything is pretty much just ‘trust me bro’.

    • errer@lemmy.worldEnglish
      91·
      9 hours ago

      Government discretionary budget is like $2T. Wasting say a quarter of a day (2 hours) of the 250 or so working days in a year is about 1/1000th the total year wasted. So figure $2B wasted, approximately.