What Did You Do Last Week?
Anyone who has worked in business has no doubt at one time or another been asked to in essence justify their existence to a boss. When I first started practicing law, I was required to not only keep track of all work done so individual clients could be billed, but to “show my work” collectively each week with the number of billable hours I had earned, as well as the monthly income received statement, for the bosses to review.
These days, I sometimes feel like my daily “to-do list” is a mile long, and I’d be happy to show higher ups my productivity level.
But that’s in the private sector…not the public sector. And now, five weeks into the second Trump Administration, the same “prove your worth” metric is being used with various government agencies. It came in the form of an email sent to government workers last Friday, giving them 48 hours to come up with five quick bullet points of what they did in the past week. Elon Musk posted on X about it, and noted that failure to respond would be interpreted as a resignation.
A few government agencies, like the FBI and State Department, told their employees that was not required, since their work involved sensitive information. That makes sense, although internal review of the same nature might be a good idea.
Musk did the same thing, you may recall, when he took over at what was then called Twitter. He quickly found underperforming employees, and their jobs were soon cut. We now learn that there is a sense that all this “work from home” may mean employees don’t check their email very often…and the idea was to trap them into not responding and proving the point. There’s also the allegation that some workers aren’t real, but their salaries are going somewhere.
One by-product, though, was that some government agencies are proudly posting their “top five” list for the week; even though it was not required of employees, the Houston branch of the FBI posted their efforts, including arresting gang members and a child predator, helping prevent a school shooting, working a triple murder/arson investigation, and searched for an illegal alien running a counterfeit license plate operation.
Not a bad week’s work…and something that helps restore faith in government, beyond rooting out waste or fraud.
So…what did you do last week? If this gets competitive between agencies, we might actually get somewhere.
