Requesting to understand

An insomnia-fueled ramble on DOGE's efforts to find fake and dead government employees whom Trump declares exist

It is four o’clock in the morning and I am thinking about a terrible thing to think about at four o’clock in the morning: Elon Musk.

Specifically, I am thinking about Musk’s recent directive that two million federal employees will need to email someone (him? Trump? HR?) five bullets explaining what they did last week.

Exhibit A: Musk’s tweet

You’ve probably seen this. Here’s what Musk, the Rasputin to Trump’s Tsar Nicholas II, tweeted or xeeted recently on his poorly named and lately unbearable social media platform, X, which used to be a well-named and interesting social media platform, Twitter.

Setting aside the substance for a moment: isn’t the syntax weird? Trump’s instructions were that employees will receive an email? Receiving an email is usually out of the receiver’s direct control. And the email itself will be “requesting to understand”? “To understand” is what the requester needs, not the requestee, nor the email. Why not write “President Trump has instructed DOGE to ask all federal employees to explain what they got done last week” or some other normal English sentence? Musk’s odd, evasive syntax immediately sets me on edge. It seems careless—and this is a situation that demands care.

Exhibit B: The email itself

Later that day all federal employees received this email from hr@opm.gov.

Please reply with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager.

Please do not send any classified information, links, or attachments.

Deadline is this Monday at 11:59pmEST.

That’s pretty straightfoward. I’m struck by the breezy abbreviated “approx.”

Exhibits C & D: Trump’s explanation, reinforced by Musk

Here is how President Trump explained DOGE’s “requesting to understand” tweet and the email asking for five bullets.

“There was a lot of genius in sending it. We’re trying to find out if people are working and so we’re sending a letter to people, please tell us what you did last week. If people don’t respond, it’s very possible that there is no such person or they’re not working...

I thought it was great because we have people that don’t show up to work and nobody even knows if they work for the government. So, by asking the question, tell us what you did this week, what he’s doing is saying, are you actually working? And then if you don’t answer, like, you’re sort of semi fired or you’re fired...

Because a lot of people are not answering because they don’t even exist. That’s how badly various parts of our government were run, especially by this last group. So, what they’re doing is they’re trying to find out who’s working for the government, are we paying other people who aren’t working?”

At first I thought this was standard-issue Trumpian poppycock where he anti-explains things he doesn’t understand, but then Musk himself reiterated this purpose, while wearing a strange outfit at a US cabinet meeting:

“What we are trying to get to the bottom of is we think there are a number of people on the government payroll who are dead, which is probably why they can't respond…And some people who are not real people, like, they're literally individuals that are collecting paychecks on a fictional individual.”

Their explanation, distilled

So in a sentence, Trump’s and Musk’s explanation of the distracting email to federal employees is this:

Sending this email and seeing if two million people respond or not is is a genius tactic in a sting operation to find government employees who are dead or fictional.

What’s wrong with this?

Do I have to explain why “to find out if you’re dead or fake” is a wackadoodle reason for asking over two million people to respond to an email? (What am I saying? Of course I don’t have to explain it. I’m just rambling in this little half-rant, half-memoir newsletter record of my thoughts on America during the age of Trump, and it’s after 4:00 AM.)

But explain I shall. And yes, I understand the whole thing is probably an effort to distract me and my fellow citizens from greater horrors, but it’s the middle of the night, and I’m in a mood to be distracted.

So here are far more than approx. 5 bullets explaining why “the email will flush out all the fake and dead federal employees” explanation is ridiculous.

• People fail to respond to emails all the time. I’ve done it several times this week! You can flag an email as urgent, you can add “immediate response required!” in the subject line, but still some people won’t respond. And it doesn’t mean they’re inept! Maybe they have a job that doesn’t really involve checking email. Maybe they have more important tasks to accomplish on Monday. Maybe their department instructs them not to comply with this, as many federal department heads did.

• As a minor matter of IT systems, using a non-response from an email address to determine if someone is getting paid when they shouldn’t be assumes that payroll and email systems are in sync. In any large organization, there are integrations and batch process and system merges. Which is to say: even if there are “a lot” of fake and dead employees who receive and don’t respond to DOGE’s email, that wouldn’t mean that they are getting paid improperly. Musk knows this.

• If I didn’t get a response to an email, I’d attribute it to about four hundred things before I’d conclude “Aha! That email address must be associated with a dead employee or a fraudster who is using it to collect a paycheck.” And here’s the thing: wouldn’t everyone? Who is the human being with a brain in his head who would conclude that people who don’t respond are fake or dead?

• Conversely, if someone does respond to the email, couldn’t they still be fraudsters? Wouldn’t a fake employee who who has set up a fake identity and is using it to collect a real paycheck just log in with their fake identity and reply to the email with fake bullets about the fake things they fake did?

• Here’s a challenge for any Trumpist who thinks this explanation makes sense. Ask your employer’s HR, Payroll, or IT departments what they would do to find employees on payroll who are fake or dead. After laughing at the very idea, would any of them say: “here’s a clever idea. You might even call it genius. I’d send a demeaning email to all employees in the company, in every department from engineering to facilities to marketing, ‘requesting to understand’ what they did last week. If they don’t reply by midnight: gotcha! They are the fake or dead ones!”
  
  Of course not. They’d all come up with a more effective and less disruptive method of finding their fake and dead employees, like employee lists for department-level HR offices to confirm or targeted audits or asking managers to verify certain suspicious employees’ pulses.

• Didn’t they kind of ruin their sting operation by explaining it on national television?

• I’m being a little cheeky here—if Trump ALREADY KNOWS that this fraud is happening, why go through this email-based sting operation? Read Trump’s words: “we have people that don’t show up to work and nobody even knows if they work for the government…” and “A lot of people are not answering because they don’t even exist.”
  
  He isn’t speculating; he is stating with simple declarative sentences that he knows this is happening. No one would make such a provocative claim, especially while serving as President of the United States of America, without already possessing a great deal of evidence. So he must already have solid evidence of this fraud. Then why the sting to determine if this is happening? Why not just use the credible information from credible sources that Trump must have already consumed?

• Let’s go back to the foundational premise for this DOGE effort. I thought it was rooted in the fairly standard small government conservative position that the US government has become bloated and our national debt is unsustainable, and therefore we might need to make difficult decisions about priorities, which could mean reducing services and capabilities and departments and even employees. (Although: payrolls to federal employees constitute only about 5% of the US budget, as Musk and Trump surely know. You can’t make much of a dent in the federal budget imbalance by reducing federal employment.)
  
  That premise may be worthy of good-faith discussion, debate, and policy-making.
  
  But that’s not why Trump says DOGE is doing this. He says nothing about debt reduction or even “efficiency.” He declares that the genius reason for doing this is because “a lot” (Trump’s words, which he must have evidence of) of dead and fake employees are collecting paychecks.

• Perhaps most importantly: I think asking huge numbers of civil servants who contribute their experience and skills to our nation, including economists, lawyers, scientists, engineers, analysts, technicians, park rangers, researchers, epidemiologists, investigators, nurses, drivers, cooks, security guards, and any other manner of human laborer, to comply with a stupid request to prove their existence is demeaning, demotivating, unhelpful, distracting—and indeed quite inefficient.
  
  If this is “running the country like a business,” isn’t that a terrible way to run a business? If any business, even one run by the most heartless, Mr. Potter-in-Bedford Falls-like caricature of heartlessness, decided to shutter a branch, shut down a division, or slash a workforce, they’d usually at least try to express some gratitude and perfunctory goodwill towards the people whose careers they are threatening and lives they are disrupting. Not Trump and Musk. These guys act and talk like any federal employee deserves only scorn.

  
  Just think about the thing Musk tweeted or xeeted a few weeks back, where he said “CFPG RIP <gravestone emoji>,” thereby announcing that he intends to shutter the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. I think tweeting “CFPG RIP <gravestone emoji>” to announce that you want to end careers of public servants is callous, cruel, and unhelpful to the country, even if you think the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau shouldn’t exist. (To be clear: I think it should exist.)
  
  I have worked for many businesses and seen layoffs from all sides. In all cases, I believe the decisions have been quite difficult for the leaders. In no cases have I seen a leader say “let’s just announce the shutdown of a division and the layoffs of thousands via a tweet with a gravestone emoji.” I actually think most corporate boards would be aghast if, say, a CFO did this. But Musk and Trump take a perverse pleasure in it.

• And the thing is, the federal government is the largest employer in the nation! Nearly every American knows people who work or have worked for the US government. I have friends, relatives, friends of friends, and colleagues with experience in government as economists, lawyers, project managers, product managers, VA nurses, communications professionals, and even quantum physicists. You probably have similar networks. I don’t think any of the people I know deserve the kind of fundamental contempt and breezy disregard that I hear from Trump and Musk. Do you? Does anyone?

• Lastly, “a letter,” Trump? You say you “are sending them a letter”?

---

So why are they doing it?

Since this cover story of a fake and dead employee sting operation is so obviously ridiculous, I find myself asking: why do it? Why say it?

And as the sun rises this morning, something occurs to me: they’re not really auditing the federal workforce for the dead and the fake; they’re auditing us, the American people. By belittling our civil servants, showing no human care, and justifying their horrors with the flimsiest lie conjured from air and fear, Trump and Musk are probing whether we will resist their demands for obedience. None of this is about efficiency or fraud prevention. It’s a power grab. “Watch us, America,” they say. “With a single, slapdash email, we can make millions of you submit. We don’t even need to spell out ‘approximately’.”

---

Raspoutine et ses enfants (Rasputin and his children). Unknown photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Retrieved from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Raspoutine_et_ses_enfants.jpg

Grigori Rasputin was a Russian mystic and self-styled holy man who became a trusted advisor to Nicholas II and Alexandra Romanov, the last Tsar and Tsarina of Russia. Though he held no formal political position, Rasputin wielded outsized influence over the royal court, fueling the discontent that preceded the Russian Revolution.