Although it looks like 1,000,000 years in the past, one in all shadow president Elon Musk’s earliest—and stupidest—concepts was making each member of the federal workforce ship a weekly e-mail with 5 issues they’d achieved. That requirement is fading away, however whereas Protection Secretary Pete Hegseth is absolving his civilian workers from future five-things emails, they’ve one final process: serving to “improve the Department’s efficiency or root out waste.”
That is, after all, an unhinged factor to ask of the greater than 700,000 civilian employees on the Protection Division. First, it shares the identical downside because the government-wide five-things e-mail: What about individuals who work with delicate authorities info? How would they summarize their work in an unclassified means? In fact, provided that Hegseth is very relaxed about sharing categorized information, perhaps that’s not a priority.
What is a priority for the workers who should reply this obligatory e-mail—an e-mail the place there isn’t a assurance that their responses might be nameless—is that Hegseth has a really slender concept of what constitutes the kind of inefficiency, waste, or fraud that he’d like eradicated.
To be truthful, the DOD e-mail does say that examples of waste could possibly be issues like “the internet doesn’t work on Tuesday,” “these regulations don’t make sense,” or “this weapons system doesn’t work.” Nonetheless, even simply taken at face worth, these examples are absurd. What precisely would one do with a criticism as obscure as “these regulations don’t make sense”? Do random DOD workers actually know which weapons programs don’t work, however higher-ups at DOD are clueless? How are intermittent web outages remotely similar to faulty weapons programs?
These are the kinds of questions that get generated by individuals who do not know what they’re doing of their high-level company job.
Precise surveys of federal workers look one thing just like the Protection Enterprise Board’s 2023 report on bettering IT person expertise on the DOD. It runs 118 pages, includes survey responses from 1000’s of workers, offers numerous metrics by which to measure end-user satisfaction, has a bit explaining analysis methodologies, and a prolonged bibliography of related publications.
Evaluate that to Hegseth’s DOD asking all workers for a spread of complaints from, principally, “my router doesn’t work” all the way in which to “all F-35 fighters do not work.” That reveals a toddler-level understanding of the duties of DOD workers, as if everybody has equal expertise and equal data to poke at random applications and name them wasteful.
There’s additionally the problem that no worker who desires to maintain their job is more likely to inform Hegseth about actual waste on the DOD. Hegseth’s concept of waste is something that isn’t designed for straight, white, cisgender troopers completely. He’s bought some author flunky over on the DOD web site who pops off fawning items bragging about how the so-called Division of Authorities Effectivity has discovered $80 million in waste on the DOD, however what qualifies as “waste” is principally simply range and local weather initiatives. Additionally, $80 million in financial savings works out to about 0.009% of the DOD’s 2024 finances of $841 billion. Such effectivity!
Hegseth was so hyped to chop something with “women” within the title that he proudly axed the Girls, Peace, and Safety program regardless that it was signed into legislation by Trump. However even having such a distinguished right-wing pedigree wasn’t sufficient to save lots of this system from Hegseth, as a result of women.
He’s so thickheaded that he oversaw a purge of DOD web sites so sloppy that the company deleted an image of the B-29 bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, as a result of that bomber was named “Enola Gay.” He’s additionally fired all of the top-level navy personnel he thinks are woke, however actually, it simply means he’s firing girls and Black individuals who have succeeded within the navy as a result of he deeply believes they shouldn’t be there.
Hegseth is on the DOD to be an expert racist and dedicated Christian nationalist, to not run a Cupboard company effectively. Don’t anticipate him to take up any worker options until they advance his racist and misogynist targets.
