President Donald Trump and Co-President Elon Musk really like this idea of making federal employees turn in a summary of what each accomplished the previous week.
That is the most monumentally stupid idea I have come across in a while.
Now some people think it’s great: Making federal employees accountable for what they do at work. One person on Facebook says she’s a teacher and has to turn in lesson plans every week. That is completely different since it lays out goals for the coming week, it is looking forward, not back. Besides, it is going to a principal, a fellow educator who knows what she or he is looking at.
When I was working as an editor at a medium-sized newspaper, a senior editor asked me to tell her what my typical day was like. Before I could reply, she must have realized what a dumb question that was and we moved on. It was dumb because she knew what my typical day was like. The routine was the same every day. Only the stories changed. Sometimes they were major or breaking, sometimes they were routine. But the process was the same for all of them.
Now, if I had to write a memo about what I did the previous week and send it off to, say, someone in corporate accounting, that person would have had no idea how to evaluate my accomplishments. I could have listed the stories we had published, but if it was a slow week, then that would have been underwhelming.
The same is true with what federal workers are being asked to do. Their supervisors should know what they are doing and whether they are productive, and how productive they are. And if those summaries go to DOGE, the group of 20-something computer engineers, those people will have no basis to judge what they are seeing. On top of that, a worker is great at being creative and can make him or herself sound fantastic, even though that person is ineffective, while another worker who just produces a boring memo may, in fact, be vital to the operations of the department.
This all sounds like some so-called management expert who came up with this idea as a way to weed out employees. The trouble is it is a monumentally stupid way of doing it.
But, then, I doubt either Trump or Musk really care about how effective federal workers are. They just want to fire people.
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