John Law (9:25)
All right, first up, let's start with what the left is saying. The left argues the move is the latest misguided attempt by Musk to slash the federal workforce. Some highlight the contradiction that Musk is acting while the White House claims he has no authority. Others say firing workers based on their response to the email would be illegal. In Just Security, Nicholas Bednar wrote about what just happened with the Musk OPM email. The OPM email does not specify how the agency intends to use the information it collects from employees. More broadly, the email raises concerns about the efficacy of the Trump administration's efforts to cut the federal workforce, Bednar said. Five bullet points, describing one workweek a week that included a federal holiday, cannot capture the importance of the work performed by most federal employees. And it certainly cannot capture the functions of those federal employees already placed on administrative leave who were explicitly prohibited from performing their job duties during the week in question. In essence, it appears that the Trump administration is demanding that employees justify their positions. But but to date, the administration has done a consistently poor job of determining which positions are in fact important, bednar wrote. Its poor track record is evidenced by agencies efforts to recall fired probationary employees after realizing they perform crucial functions such as managing the nuclear stockpile and the power grid, or those working on responses to bird flu. Meaningful reorganization of the federal workforce requires more than five bullet points. It requires a holistic evaluation of how federal programs operate. In the Washington Post, Aaron Blake said Elon Musk's threat to federal employees is the latest episode to call into question the White House's downplaying of his authority. The email, which even some Republicans have criticized as ham handed or cruel, gave the workers a deadline of Monday night to respond. But what has happened since has been somewhat remarkable. Leaders at Several agencies, including Trump's own political appointees, have instructed employees not to respond to the email or to hold off on responding, blake wrote. It's perhaps the first big example of would be allies publicly resisting Musk's influence. Musk's tactics have been rubbing some Trump advisors the wrong way, as the Post reported Friday, but the tensions hadn't really broken out into the open. Beyond that is how it all squares with the White House's claims about Musk's role. Just five days before the fiasco, after all, the White House had claimed Musk had no formal or actual authority then he basically threatened to end the employment of large numbers of federal workers if those employees didn't do what he told them, blake said. In other words, it's an unclear mess, and it's one the White House and the Trump administration surely aren't done being made to account for, both in courts of law and in the court of public opinion, where Musk is increasingly a problem for them. In Slate, Scott Politic explored the true purpose of Elon Musk's weekend email ultimatum. It's unclear why Musk's non response resignation threat doesn't also appear in the email, but one might plausibly speculate that an attorney intervened, given the Merit Systems Protection Board's unequivocal finding that a federal worker's resignation must be affirmative and voluntary as a matter of fundamental fairness and due process, palutek wrote. Federal agencies are already required, per 5 USC Section 4302, to establish appraisal systems to rate employees performance. The agencies are constrained to use objective standards and criteria appropriate to the particular employee being evaluated. The email from hropm.gov exists entirely outside of this framework, starting with the fact that the OPM isn't an agency. A minor irony to Musk's dead workers collecting paychecks claim is that Musk himself is apparently a legal ghost heading, but not really heading Doge, a quasi legal entity that is presently enjoying all the authority of a congressionally created federal agency without any of the reporting and transparency obligations, Politics said For Russell Vaught, the director of the Office of Management and Budget and the architect of Project 2025, the primary motivating factor behind his proposal to make it easier to fire federal workers is clearly malice. For Musk, a relative newcomer to far right politics, it seems to be more about domination and the lulz. Alright, that is it for what the left is saying. Which brings us to what the the right is say the right is mixed on the directive, though some say the episode could benefit Doge in the long run by clarifying the limits of Musk's authority. Many defend Musk and say the reaction from federal workers has been overblown. Others suggest the request creates its own inefficiencies. In national review, Andrew C. McCarthy called it a farcical episode but said the pushback to Musk could help Doge in court. I'm not sure Doge is much more than a public relations stunt. It is titillating the Trump base by sending all the right Democrats and government employee unions into a tizzy, mccarthy wrote. Still, a sudden court ruling that Musk is wielding power unconstitutionally would stop the Murky operation in its tracks. It probably helps Doge, then, that the officials with unquestioned executive authority are treating Musk as though he's just making suggestions, even if that may irk the president. Obviously, it's not a bad idea for the Trump administration to scrutinize the federal workforce, but that's why federal agencies have layers of supervision, McCarthy said. I suspect this is mostly theater. By the time you read this in the dog years that are the new days of the Trump era, the episode will no doubt have been overrun by five or ten new constitutional crises. But by countermanding Musk, Trump officials have probably helped him show that he's mainly a consultant, not a major government officer for appointments clause purposes. In Town hall, Jeff Charles said federal workers freakout over Elon Musk's email reaches new heights. I don't really see a problem with this request, but I can understand those arguing that it's a bit hamfisted. As Representative John Curtis, the Republican from Utah, said during an interview, if I could say one thing to Elon Musk, it's like, please put a dose of compassion in this and that. It's a false narrative to say that we have to cut and you have to be cruel to do it as well, charles wrote. Threatening someone's job over an email might not be the most efficient leadership strategy if Musk and his team want to get people on board with his initiative. Moreover, this should probably be left to the heads of federal agencies to determine how best to ascertain what their workers are accomplishing. It is also worth noting that there is no way Doge will be able to comb over the tens of thousands of emails sent by federal employees. However, the notion that such a move would require a lawsuit also seems silly. Yes, the approach was harsh, but how difficult is it to send a quick email listing five things one accomplished over the past seven days? This is one of several lawsuits folks on the left have filed to stymie the Doge agenda. So it seems likely that this is motivated more by politics than fairness. In the Atlantic, Colin Friedersdorf wrote about the obvious inefficiency of Elon Musk's New Order on Saturday. Elon Musk, the billionaire charged by President Donald Trump with cutting government wasted, alerted the public to massive inefficiency in the federal bureaucracy. Government employees would soon be distracted from their actual work by a request from on high, friedersdorf said. As someone who hates government waste, I sympathize with any Americans who are cheering this initiative because they believe it will expose workers who accomplish nothing. But those Americans are cheering, albeit unwittingly, for massive inefficiency. Just the latest example of the chaos Doge has created across the federal government, undercutting its own aims. Consider America's roughly 14,000 Federal Aviation Administration air traffic controllers. If each one of them spends just 10 minutes opening their work email, finding this request, drafting a response, proofreading it and sending it off, that adds up to 2,333 hours of work. Can you think of a more cartoonish example of government waste than using 292 workdays worth of man hours to clarify that? Last week air traffic controllers monitored planes, friedersdorff wrote. Watching Musk, a man recently focused on electric cars and getting humanity to mars direct his inventiveness toward the public sector equivalent of TPS reports is vexing. Improving federal efficiency is a worthy project. Trump will have no incentive to deliver on it if his base credulously cheers gambits as wasteful and poorly defended as this one. All right, let's head over to Isaac for his take.
