Rage against the "low bar"

Federal workers to Elon Musk: you're not the boss of me, and your tyranny stinks.

Have you seen Elon Musk’s X timeline lately? No, don’t look. I’ll save your eyes. Musk had an unsigned email from OPM go out to all federal employees last week asking them to reply with what they’ve accomplished. On Saturday, Musk tweeted a reply, “That would be a very impressive and long list indeed for you! However, the passing grade is literally just 'Can you send an email with words that make any sense at all?'. It’s a low bar."

Photo: Bill Life, Flickr

Oh it makes a lot of sense. Musk is purposely missing the point of federal workers failure to clear his “low bar.” He mocked tweets claiming some federal workers don’t have access to email on the weekend, or that Elon is “not their boss.” News flash: he’s not their boss. The federal government does not work for Elon Musk, like people at Tesla, or NeuraLink, or SpaceX or xAI, or any of the other business ventures he runs like a tyrant.

Musk originally tweeted: “Consistent with President @realDonaldTrump’s instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week. Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.” And the heads of the agencies, appointed by Trump and confirmed by the Senate, said “no.” And it’s appropriate they said “no.”

It’s not that government employees should not be accountable in their work. I am the first to tell you that the federal workforce is rife with all kinds of people who skate by doing the minimum. I’ve seen all kinds of fraud, waste, and abuse with my own eyes. Most of it is petty. Most of the workers who skate also, at least in a perfunctory way, do their jobs. They show up, go to meetings, and meet whatever low bar their office has for them.

And when even the low performers get an unsigned email from OPM asking what they did, they instinctively know to rebel, because if it smells like tyranny, it probably is.

Elon Musk is a tyrant. He fires people without cause—people he only two weeks before saw and praised. Walter Isaacson’s book is replete with stories about people who “put their back into it” (as Musk also tweeted), working 24-hours at a time, and randomly ran into Musk at a bad moment, and got summarily fired. Musk tried to back out of an investment in his own brother Kendall’s business once because he said his financial adviser thought the plan wasn’t viable. Kendall threatened never to speak to him again, and Musk relented. Someone who treats his own brother this way, and acts like a tyrant at work is not fit for government service.

That’s because—listen carefully—government is service. It’s not a business. I don’t care how Elon Musk runs his own businesses. If he wants to be a tyrant there, let him. I would not work for him, because he’s a tyrant. He doesn’t care if it’s Christmas Day—you better be around to, say, remove servers from a data center on his whim, because his word is more important than your family, or your own life. Working for Musk isn’t working for a boss, it’s being owned as a serf by a lord.

Someone who thinks this way is unfit for government service. It might be interesting to see some of Musk’s findings (through DOGE) on how to cut some fat out of the government, but the price of that cutting cannot be tyranny. The federal workers who balked at Musk’s “low bar” know this. Sure, some of them are acting in their own self-interest, in a selfish way. Of course, federal agencies have an interest in their own survival. Budgets are spent in order to maintain a budget line. Projects are started in order to justify the jobs of the people doing them. This is natural.

But there are other ways to deal with those defects. Perhaps zero-based budgeting. Or a national push for a constitutional amendment allowing the president a line-item veto on budget bills passed by Congress, perhaps with a lower requirement for Congress to override the veto. Yes, these are harder things than simply being a tyrant, because they require collaboration, political nuance, persuasion, and debate.

Musk brooks no debate when he makes up his mind. He has a machine-like focus and an emotional detachment that allows him to be a very effective tyrant.

Regardless of what kind of federal employee these workers are, they all understand that they work for the government, not a tyrant. And the message coming from the federal workforce about Musk’s “low bar” is (excuse the crudeness) “screw you, Elon, you are not the boss of me.” Musk’s reflex is to fire them all, and he may get President Donald Trump behind that, because Trump’s narcissism is only eclipsed by his paranoia.

I think the federal workers should rightly rebel against the “low bar.” Because the next bar will be higher. It won’t be “what did you do last week.” It will be “how will you get on board with the Trump train?” Or “turn in your woke relatives.” Now some of this stuff is already culturally relevant, because in prior, Democrat-run administrations, people have been encouraged to turn in their relatives for political indoctrination. But this is a whole different animal. It’s a matter of fealty to a man, and that man’s majordomo, with the threat of losing your job, when your job is service to the people of the United States.

No, sir. The federal workforce is not to be given a “low bar” to clear by a man who is a tyrant, who hasn’t been appointed to any actual federal position created by Congress, who acts like a senior cabinet member without any portfolio, who has never been confirmed by the Senate. We cannot hand control over to a Rasputin, and the federal workforce, along with Trump’s cabinet, is right to reject this tyranny.

This rebellion isn’t over yet. Trump has fired the Joint Chiefs chairman, and the Chief of Naval Operations. The combination of Musk’s tyrant email and Trump’s military purge may (I predict will) backfire. This isn’t about wokeness. I’m fine sending the message that the military is to be lethal, not a social experiment. But the message goes far beyond wokeness. The message is submission to tyrants and their henchmen. At some level, the next people appointed to high military office will hit their line in the sand, and the next ones after that. At some point, the military will lose effectiveness, if it becomes like what Vladimir Putin rules over—a ball of paranoia submitted to one man’s will.

Elon Musk pushes Trump’s paranoia to new levels. He is a bad influence on the president. This course of tyranny will ruin the country and our government if pushed to the limits, because the work force will rebel, and be fired, and whoever takes their place will eventually meet the same fate, while the rest of the nation suffers. And come 2026, every Republican in office will find their jobs threatened by voters who are fed up with tyrants and Rasputins running amok.

Nobody can tell Trump what to do, so “talking sense” to him is off the table. But Trump does listen to public sentiment regarding him, at least among his supporters. A general rebellion among federal workers, supported by his newly-confirmed, hand-picked, politically vetted cabinet, is something that might get Trump to change his behavior. Hopefully, he will put a muzzle on Musk, but that’s also unlikely. It’s more likely that Musk will take his DOGElings and go home. Good riddance.

In the meantime, federal workers should continue their rage against the “low bar.” End the tyrant Musk’s reign, and the sooner, the better.

CHECK OUT Risky Tales, my site for fiction, that just might be true enough to happen.

SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS: You can follow us on social media at several different locations. Official Racket News pages include:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NewsRacket
Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/NewsRacket
Mastodon: https://federated.press/@RacketNews

Threads: https://www.threads.net/@theracketnews
David: https://www.threads.net/@captainkudzu71
Steve: https://www.threads.net/@stevengberman

Our personal accounts on the platform formerly known as Twitter:

David: https://twitter.com/captainkudzu
Steve: https://twitter.com/stevengberman
Jay: https://twitter.com/curmudgeon_NH

Thanks again for subscribing! Don’t forget to share us with your friends!