Speaker 1: What's going on?
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Get every episode for free, rite to your smartphone or tablet,
and again, thank you so much for your support. Elon
Musk has apparently or I don't know if it was
actually from him, or if it came from the Doge Dudes,
the Musketeers or something. I don't know, but an email
went out and it said everybody in the federal workforce
has to write up sort of an explanation of what
exactly would you say you do here? And as you
might imagine, outreach has ensued now. To be fair, okay,
if I were to get this kind of an email
from my management that said, hey, we are you know,
doing an audit or something or we need to know
what exactly you're filling your day with. Tell us you
know five things that you did over the last week
work related things. What did you get accomplished.
Speaker 1: What did you do?
Speaker 2: I am certain there would be some some grousing and
some grumbling and such, perhaps even a bit of disgruntlement,
but I would do it. I would probably just send
a link to all like fifteen episodes of the prior
week's podcast.
Speaker 1: Let's say, here you go. It's what I've been doing.
Speaker 2: But I am fluent in sarcasm, and so that's you know,
that might get me into some trouble if they asked
me to do it. But here's the thing, I would
do it. I would do it because that's the management
request or requirement. They're asking, tell us what you got done.
And see, here's the thing too, Like I obviously you
can tell if I've been on the air, and you're
my boss, you're gonna know if I'm not on the
air because you either had to find somebody to fill
in for me or there was three hours of dead air, right,
so you're gonna know what I'm doing.
Speaker 1: I would still write, you know, I did.
Speaker 2: This, I did that five bullet points, you know, cranked
out all of these shows whatever. I would probably throw
in more than five. You know why it looks better.
You know, they're like, well, we asked for five, and
he gave us like thirty. That's fantastic. He's an overachiever.
We're going to keep him on staff. See, because there
is a recognition that the job is not mine. I
am just simply holding this job. The job is the company's.
And that is a mindset that a lot of people
in the private sector don't understand, but virtually one hundred
percent of the people in the public sector don't understand.
It's not your job. You're just doing it. The job
is the government's.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: If you're a teacher, that's the school district's job and
they have hired you to do it, it's not yours. Okay,
you don't own it. You can't dictate its terms. The
employer does that. But in the federal bureaucracy aka the
deep state, simply asking somebody what they did over the
last five days is tantamount to a federal lawsuit worthy event,
and in fact, there have been federal lawsuits now filed
over this. I mean imagine that simply sending an email saying,
can you tell me five things that you accomplished last
week as part of your job, and your response is
to sue And by the way, you don't get to
include that in the list of your last week's accomplishments. Okay,
you cannot. I feel like that's a bit that would
be like double dipping. So the associated press in this
story appeared at whyy dot org, which is I would
assume an NPR affiliate whyy or why dot org? See
if it was the private news company, then it would
be dot com. So dot org indicates to me it's
an NPR affiliate, so public radio.
Speaker 1: So here's how the AP reported it.
Speaker 2: Confusion and chaos loom as hundreds of thousands of federal
employees begin their workweek today facing a deadline from President
Donald Trump's cost cutting chief Elon Musk to explain their
recent accomplishments or risk losing their jobs. Musk's unusual demand.
Isn't that part of the problem right there, that it's
an unusual demand? Shouldn't you know, like things that you've
accomplished over the last week? Right if you go into
the office, and that doesn't count either simply showing up
for work, although maybe for some people it actually should count.
You might want to put that on there, especially if
you haven't been doing a lot of working in the office.
After they told you've got to return to the office.
But showing up to work and doing your job, simply
doing your job would theoretically give you the list of
the things that you've accomplished, right, because that's what you
are hired to do. You're hired to do things and
to perform certain tasks and to accomplish them. Hence, you
would have a list. You would say, I was hired
to do X, Y Z, and I have done XYZ
over the last week. I did two x's, a y
and two z's. Look at me fulfilling my tasks?
Speaker 1: That's it.
Speaker 2: This is not like the reaction to this has really
been illustrative, hasn't it that?
Speaker 1: Oh my god, go believe you're asking me what I do?
Speaker 2: You should always be asked what you're doing. That's what
managers should be asking of all of their subordinates is
what are you doing? Are you fulfilling your tasks? His
unusual demand has faced resistance from several key US agencies,
led by the president's loyalists. By the way, loyalists is
a term that is never applied to Democrats. Just in
case you were wondering about that. Loyalists and even Republicans
it's only Donald Trump that gets this term. Only Donald
Trump hires loyalists. See Democrats when they make all of
their appointments for ambassadors that gave them a bunch of
money and people that love them, like, oh no, no,
we are to believe that it's only Donald Trump that
hires loyalists. It's never anybody else. They always put people
in positions that opposed them on everything that makes sense.
So some of these these agency heads have instructed their
employees not to comply. Lawmakers in both parties said Musk's
mandate may be illegal, while unions are threatening to sue
all because he said, tell me what you've gotten done
in the last week, and like that's getting pushed back.
Musk's team sent an email to hundreds of thousands of
federal employees, which, by the way, remember there was a
there was an argument, a legal argument is to whether
or not you could even email all the employees government workers,
and the unions and the agencies were like, you cannot
even send an email to your workforce. Again, imagine this.
The president is in charge of the executive branch, and
if the president or his delegated representative wants to send
a message to all the workforce. They should be allowed
to do so. I don't understand why this is so
controversial now depending on what's in that message, Like you
can't send a message in fundraise, right, but if you're
sending a message to all federal workers to let them know,
like hey, we're going to be doing cake in the
office on Thursday whatever, Like if it's workplace related, then
you know, Jean's Friday, you know, for everybody. Again, like,
it may not be the best use of your time,
but you should be able to send those messages. You're
the boss, and people are like, we're gonna too if
you send me an email, Like, guys, do you understand
anything about what happens out here in private sector land aka.
Speaker 1: The real world?
Speaker 2: Do you even understand how this stuff goes? We get emails,
I will tell you people in this building and not
since I've arrived, but I have heard the stories of
the rambling emails that would be sent out to employees
that people didn't even understand what was being said. Like
this is something that happens all the time in the
private sector. Bosses send emails to their subordinates and they
have the ability to do that, and they're actually able
to ask them, what have you done over the last week?
Speaker 1: You can ask that question as a boss.
Speaker 2: All right, if you're listening to this show, you know
I try to keep up with all sorts of current events,
and I know you do too. And you've probably heard
me say get your news from multiple sources. Why well,
because it's how you detect media bias, which is why
I've been so impressed with ground News. It's an app,
and it's a website, and it combines news from around
the world in one place, so you can compare coverage
and verify information. You can check it out at check
dot ground, dot news, slash pete. I put the link
in the podcast description too. I started using ground News
a few months ago and more recently chose to work
with them as an affiliate because it lets me see
clearly how stories get covered and by whom. The blind
spot feature shows you which stories get ignored by the
left and the right. See for yourself. Check dot ground,
dot news slash pete. Subscribe through that link and you'll
get fifteen percent off any subscription. I use the Vantage
plan to get unlimited access to every feature. Your subscription
then not only helps my podcast, but it also supports
ground news as they make the media landscape more transparent.
Got some emails here, This from Tim Pete regarding the
emails on you know, what did you do over the
last week? In the real world, this would be called
billable hours.
Speaker 1: Yes, I don't know what's wrong with the bell there? Oh,
it was stuck on a cord.
Speaker 2: There we go better, whether it be maintenance, engineering, legal, medical,
et cetera, et cetera. You get the idea of productive types. Now,
maybe in the federal sector, some do fifteen minutes of
work a week and watch porn the rest of the week.
I got that thought from a high level IT guy.
By the way, right, do you remember they had to
put out some sort of a directive or something. Remember
where they found like all of these federal employees that
were watching porn on their company or government laptops. Remember
that that was oh gosh, probably ten years ago or something.
But yeah, So if you're not aware of this, and
I've forget what the exact breakdown is, but I want
to say, well, in the paralegal field, okay, and well,
in the paralegal field, you have to mark all of
your time and they do it by like six minute
intervals or something like that. Did you know that they
keep a clock so they can count, however, many units
of the hour, because then they build a client for
work that is done. So if you're gonna you're gonna,
you know, work for an entire hour non stop on
somebody's case, then you get like ten units of six
minutes apiece or something like that, or maybe it's six
units of ten minutes apiece. I forget the breakdown, but
they literally keep clocks. You think punching a clock, you know,
coming in and leaving for the day with an in
and out for lunch or something.
Speaker 1: You think that's tough.
Speaker 2: How about every six minutes or ten minutes you're having
to keep track of your time. See like again, this
is what and I recognize I probably don't have the
softest shoulder to cry on. Every single job has its
trade offs. They all have pros and cons. The question
is do the pros outweigh the cons for you? And
if you are miserable in your job and all the
cons outweigh all the pros, then you.
Speaker 1: Should find something else to do. And then I rememberminded
of the.
Speaker 2: Saying that I think it was Jordan Peterson maybe who said,
the toughest thing you've ever been through is the toughest
thing you've ever been through. And right, this is a
problem when you have people that have never actually been
through anything tough and then they melt when they get
an email that says, hey, tell us what you did.
Give us your your list of accomplishments over the last
week or two, like what have you been working on,
and they're trying to figure out whether you are actually
doing any work whatsoever.
Speaker 1: I got a.
Speaker 2: I got a tweet here, it's a Pete tweet.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I forget.
Speaker 2: Well it was I think it was a couple of
days ago. But they pointed out the similarity going on
here with when Pat McCrory became governor of North Carolina,
and he told he came onto my show at the
time and he was telling me how like he actually
went out and visited some of the agencies and departments
and he would walk through to see them. He said
people there were there were people that went and hid
under desks from him because they did not want him
to know that they had been assigned into a particular
department or agency. Right, this is a it's a patronage system, right,
that's what they were trying to avoid detection of a
patronage system where you put people on the state payroll
that are not qualified to be there, but know somebody
or something, and they get the job, and maybe they
don't have to do very much, but it's employment. It
keeps them employed, and they are grateful to whoever it
was that gave them that job, and so they make
political contributions. And this has been going on in our
state for over one hundred.
Speaker 1: And fifty years.
Speaker 2: Okay, this was the patronage system that the Democrat machine
built during reconstruction and after. And that's the point of
this exercise. Let me get back to a couple more
emails here. Dennisays, just imagine how freaked out these government
snowflakes would be if Elon said they all had to
show up at their respective job locations for a single OMG.
And Dave says, letting the boss know what you have
been doing is pretty normal. I don't know why this
is such a big deal. I spent twenty two years
in the Air Force, and we had EPRs and listed
performance reports every year. I think a lot of civilian
companies have yearly similar reports on employees too. Some of
our lazier supervisors who did not keep track of subordinates
would ask what they've done when a report was due.
I always kept track of my duties, accomplishments, etc. When
I knew my EPR was due, right Like, this is
a common way to measure what the workforce is accomplishing.
Ikifu on the Twitter machine says, if you're really working,
the hard part would be putting it all down. At
any one time, I am probably working on three to
five things. And Melissa says, this is why I've always
believed the year end review process should be eliminated. A
good manager knows what and how their staff are doing,
if not on a daily basis, then minimally a weekly basis.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: Well, but here's the thing, right, We've all had bad
managers and that happens, and they don't do this kind
of stuff. And you know, I've been in situations where
you know, the latest edict comes down from on high,
and you know, you get people scrambling and scurrying to comply,
and you know, after a while you realize, just you know,
give it four five months, they will have forgotten about
this too, just like they have all of the other things.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: But as but when you when you have a new
administration coming in, when you have a new company that
takes over or whatever, they're going to do a review
of the entire operation to see what people are doing
and what their jobs are, and they're going to look
for efficiencies. And that's what DOJ doing. The E in
DOGE stands for efficiency. This should not be a surprise.
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All right, So the Elon Musk doge team sent out
an email two hundreds of thousands of federal employees on Saturday,
so they probably didn't even see the email. The workers
probably didn't even see the email till this morning, but
they got forty eight hours to report five specific things
they had accomplished last week. In a separate message on x,
Musk said, any employee who failed to respond by the
deadline set in the email as eleven fifty nine pm
tonight would lose their job. Okay, so you have to respond. Now,
if you were on vacation, I assume that you just
say I was on vacation, right, mass confused.
Speaker 1: Now here's the other thing, though, I got an email right.
Speaker 2: From Jeff, who says, part of the point here also
is to confirm that there is actually a living, breathing person,
you know, doing the job drawing a paycheck, right lest
it be laundered down some black hole that perhaps end
up in an LLC owned by Hunter Biden.
Speaker 1: Like, that's that is a concern.
Speaker 2: No, Seriously, if you've got people that are not responding
to any emails, you might not actually have a person
in that position. And so this is kind of like
an audit. Todd says, why would the federal government employees
not want to use this chance to show all they
do and show how they should be making even more money? Right?
Speaker 1: Like, yeah, here's you want the hack for this?
Speaker 2: By the way, Okay, if you're a federal employee and
you are agonizing over how exactly to come up with
a list of the bullet points of all your accomplishments,
here's the hack. All right, here's the cheat code. Go
pull up the solicitation for the job. Go pull up
your job description and just copy and paste that because
they put out the requirements like when hey, we're looking
for somebody that's going to do this and this and
this and this, and you just take that and put
it into your response.
Speaker 1: Back to the Associated Press story.
Speaker 2: Mass confusion cats and dogs living together followed on the
eve of the deadline, as some agencies resisted the orders,
others encouraged their workers to comply, and still others offered
conflicting guidance. One message on Sunday morning from the Department
of Health and Human Services, led by Robert F. Kennedy Junior,
instructed its eighty thousand employees to comply. That was shortly
after the Acting General Counsel Sean Keviny had instructed some
not to, and by Sunday evening, agency leadership issued new
instructions that employees should quote pause activities related to the
request until well about half.
Speaker 1: An hour ago.
Speaker 2: Now I don't know why they're pausing it, but newly
confirmed FBI Director Cash Patel, an outspoken Trump ally, instructed
employees to ignore Musk's request at least for now.
Speaker 1: Quote.
Speaker 2: The FBI, through the Office of the Director, is in
charge of all of our review processes. And will conduct
reviews in accordance with FBI procedures. When and if further
information is required, we will coordinate the responses for now.
Please pause any responses now. The other thing here is like,
how many employees are there in the federal government. There's
hundreds of thousands of them, right, would you like, can
you imagine what that inbox must look like when if
you get like half of the employees to respond, you're
going to there's no way you're going to be able
to read all those emails. Department of State, Department of Defense,
and Department of Homeland Security. They wrote in an email
that essentially the department leadership would respond on behalf of
the workers. Musk on Sunday called his latest request quote
a very basic pulse check.
Speaker 1: Quote.
Speaker 2: The reason this matters is that a significant number of
people who are supposed to be working for the government
are doing so little work that they are not checking
their email at all. In some cases, we believe non
existent people or the identities of dead people are being
used to collect paychecks. In other words, there is outright fraud.
So once again, the pushback to this is instructive, right,
And this is why I think you guys are not
winning hearts and minds, not the doge people. Anybody who
works in the private sector has had stuff like this
happen to them at some point in their career. Virtually
everybody right in a professional, white collar environment, this kind
of stuff occurs, and you know, some of it is
sort of the latest thing.
Speaker 1: I'll never forget.
Speaker 2: The first time I encountered like this phenomenon was the
was the fishes over at the Mecklenburg County DSS Social
Department of Social Services. And there was a guy that
led the agency's name was Jake Jacobson, and he had
apparently done some like management training course or something like that,
and it was all built around throwing fishes. And so
they had all these like stuffed animals, you know, like
these dolls, like these fish dolls, and they would toss
them around the office, right, So there are all sorts
of these. It had. It came out of like the
Seattle Fish Market thing where they're like, you know, it
only works if there's a team and everyone like you
gotta work together and throw the fish and whatever, you know,
getting it's a team building things like they take you
out to the rope's course and like, all right, everybody,
now you're going to stand here and catch the boss
as they fall backwards.
Speaker 1: You know that kind of thing.
Speaker 2: These again, some of them may be effective, some of
them are not. But this kind of this kind of
pulse check thing happens pretty frequently, and your reaction is
so over the top end sane employees that you're not
winning any converts to your cause. You know, stories are powerful.
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dot com. Transcends a tweet. It's a pete tweet. He says,
I have no sympathy for these workers. I'm fence sub
fence maybe FEDS. I don't know, fence sub and get paid,
buy the job and have to report progress every week
on Thursday to get paid. I haven't had a vacation
in six years. My dad had a quadruple bypassed last
year and came back in a month a bunch of babies.
So that's what I mean. Like, you're not winning people
over to your cause. You're not gaining sympathy by literally
filing lawsuits when somebody asks you, what exactly do you
say you do? Here the Trumpet Minute. Also this is WSOCTV,
but it's the Associated Press story. The Trump administration moved
its fast paced dismantling of the US Agency for International Development,
or USAID, toward what appeared to be its final phases,
telling all but a fraction of staffers worldwide that they
were on leave as of today, and notifying at least
sixteen hundred of the US based staffers they were being fired.
The move was the latest and one of the biggest
steps in what President Donald Trump and cost cutting ally
Elon Musk say is their goal of gutting the six
decade old Aid and Development Agency in a broader campaign
to slash the size of the federal government. The move
comes after a federal judge on Friday allowed the administration
to move forward with its plan to pull thousands of
USAID staffers off the job in the US and around
the world world. The district Judge, Carl Nichols rejected please
in a lawsuit from employees to keep temporarily blocking the
government's plan. So that got lifted on Friday, which we
had said when I went over this stuff last week,
we talked about all of these different court cases or
these stays, the request for stay right temporary restraining orders.
They run to a judge that they think is sympathetic
and they're like, you know, don't let them enforce this thing.
The district judge says, Okay, well, you know I'm going
to put in a temporary restraining order and then issue
some sort of an injunction that covers the entire country.
Even though it's just one group of plaintiffs in one
venue and one judge. It's law fare and the Supreme Court.
Members of the Supreme Court have taken a very di
view of this kind of proliferation of this tactic. So
here's the judge saying on Friday that, no, we're not
going to keep blocking the government's plan. As of eleven
fifty nine pm last night, so Sunday night into Monday
morning today, all USAID direct higher personnel, with the exception
of designated personnel responsible for mission critical functions, core leadership,
and or specially designated programs, will be placed on administrative
leave globally.
Speaker 1: That's according to the.
Speaker 2: Notice that was sent out to USAID workers and that
the Associated Press saw. At the same time. The agency
said in the notices to staffers that it was beginning
a firing process called a reduction in force or a riff.
I've been riffed twice in my life.
Speaker 1: I can.
Speaker 2: I can have sympathy for people that are going through this.
There is no reason to be cruel to people that
you know, applied for a job, took a job, was
doing they were doing a good job, so they thought,
and then they get let go. Right, These are people
with families to support with mortgages and the like. So
I'm not celebrating the hardship that people are now going
to face when they get let go. I never do.
But I also am not going to go tell them
to go learn to code, as a lot of people
in the media told all those guys that got laid
off with the Keystone pipeline project, right when Biden came
in and shut that down, right when manufacturing in blue
collar jobs get shut down or lost or shipped overseas
or whatever, and the response from the media and sort
of the quote established has been to oh, you know,
you could learn to code. And it became this this
response that was you know, thrown at blue collar workers
when their jobs were downsized out of existence, then when
they were riffed, and then of course, you know, when
reporters get laid off, then people were responding to the
reporters with the same learned to code line, and then
of course they got you know, censored on social media. Literally,
the phrase learned to code was banned on certain platforms
because it wasn't nice. See, So it's it's the same thing,
by the way, that is going on with the immigration debate.
If if these types of journalism jobs and political jobs,
white collar jobs, if these jobs were being gutted and
taken by illegal immigrants for much lower costs, and journalists
were being thrown out of work, there would be a
completely different perspective on the way these stories get covered.
And that's why you got Trump. The administration gave no
explanation for a discrepancy in the total headcount. I thought
this was one last interesting point, that it was a
firing process called the riff that would eliminate two thousand
US based jobs. A version of the notice that was
posted on the website, though, put the number of jobs
to be eliminated at sixteen hundred. So we don't know
why there is that, why there's a discrepancy of some
four hundred jobs. Trump and Musk contend that USAID's work
is wasteful and furthers a liberal agenda. So it's no,
it's not a liberal agenda. It's a leftist, progressive, globalist,
Marxist agenda.
Speaker 1: That's what we're doing.
Speaker 2: Oh and by the way, it's a jobs program for Democrats.
That's another reason why. And the programs that you are
funding with taxpayer dollars are not something that USAID should
be funding in the first place, so it's not just
you know, liberal agenda. All right, that'll do it for
this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could
not do the show without your support and the support
of the businesses that advertise on the podcast, so if
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heard it here. You can also become a patron at
my Patreon page or go to dpetecleanershow dot com. Again,
thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything
while I'm gone.