So apparently DOGE’s “what are five things you did at work last week” is now an ongoing weekly task, which I am heartily in favor of, at least until the Trump Administration’s reforms to the executive branch are complete. The best counter-argument for this policy that I’ve heard so far comes from Cal Newport, who points out that this sort of request is typical of an insecure and overbearing manager, but I don’t find that argument very convincing. Given the sheer amount of corruption and outright fraud that Elon Musk’s DOGE has already uncovered, I think there are very good reasons for the Trump Administration to be overbearing. Besides, it really shouldn’t be that hard to come up with five bullet points, as I will demonstrate now.
Last week, I:
- finished releasing all of my books in audio on Audible, using KDP’s AI narration tools,
- made a rough outline for a seven book series, of which my current WIP (The Soulbond and the Sling) will be the first,
- re-released “Lord of the Slaves” as a free short story,
- wrote up character sheets for all of the viewpoint characters in The Soulbond and the Sling, and
- outlined twelve separate throughlines in the story bible for The Soulbond and the Sling.
Oh, the trauma. How can I possibly be expected to do this every week? And people say that writing isn’t a “real” job… in any case, I plan to make this a regular thing for as long as DOGE and Elon Musk continue to keep it going. Feel free to add your own five bullets in the comments!
As for me:
1. Got some atlases and a book on National Parks from the library for research.
2. Re-watched The Fat Electrician’s (rather expletive-laden) video essay on the government’s cheese caves. For research.
3. Beta-read another author’s latest book. Building good relationships with other authors is important, too, and I thoroughly enjoyed it!
4. Made some notes about plausible scenarios for my futuristic WIP.
5. Wrote the first few pages of said WIP and came up with names for the main characters.
That’s great, E.C! Best of luck with your new WIP!
Do you worry about Elon, a business owner, having a potential conflict of interest when it comes to investigating government regulators?
Regardless, forcing every government worker to send an email detailing what they’ve done in the past week to some third party, who most likely won’t have time to actually review anything, is a huge waste of time for everyone involved. But I guess this new waste shouldn’t be investigated.
It’s not like the government departments have their own budgets and need to stay within them, giving them incentives not to have workers sit on their hands all week. And if you think their budgets should be lower, great, but that’s not what DOGE is capable of doing. The budgets are sent out ahead of time by Congress and they have that much money for the year. Should the budgets be lower? Depending on the dept, sure.
Greg, I guarantee that the two minutes it takes a federal employee to write and send a five bullet point email is less than .001% as wasteful as sending a government paycheck to a fraudulent employee account. You do make a decent point about the potential for Elon’s conflict of interest, given how much government money he’s taken for his companies. But that’s a bit like saying we need to check the patient for breast cancer when what she really needs is an emergency C-section.