Tag Archives: federal workforce
DOGE Email Throws Federal Agencies Into Chaos and Confusion
On Saturday, employees throughout the federal government received an email from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), demanding a reply with “approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week.” On X, Elon Musk posted that failure to respond, “will be taken as a resignation.” The result? Confusion, chaos, and resentment among a federal workforce that increasingly feels under attack. “So f-ing dumb,” says one air traffic controller who received the email and was granted anonymity for fear of retribution. Leaders of many agencies appear to have been caught off guard. At the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which houses the National Weather Service, some managers initially cautioned against replying to the email in case it was a phishing attempt. Another NOAA employee says they were cautioned not to log onto their work email after receiving it. more, >>CLICK TO READ<< 12:27
Battle To Watch: Trump Versus the “We Be’s”
There are a lot of hot battles to watch out for in 2017. President Trump versus Congress. President Trump versus the press. President Trump versus the Democrats. President Trump versus the Chinese, Mexico, Iran, and the Islamic State. But one of the potentially most explosive of all will be Trump versus the bureaucracy. The executive branch civilian workforce numbers about 2.7 million; the uniformed military are another 1.5 million. Against that more or less permanent federal workforce of roughly 4 million people, President Trump gets to fill maybe 4,000 jobs. A lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Robert Behn, writes about this as “the law of diminishing control: the larger any organization becomes, the weaker is the control over its actions exercised by those at the top.” He says bureaucrats speak of “residents” and “tourists” — the residents are the bureaucrats, the tourists are political appointees, just passing through. Or, Behn writes, a member of the permanent government refers to himself or herself as a “We Be” — as in, “We be here before you’re here. We be here after you’re here.” Read the story here 11:36
