Over the past two weeks, “President” Elon Musk and his barely adult DOGE team have descended on Washington DC seeking to infiltrate the government’s most sensitive financial and technical systems. As an example of the caliber of people Elon keeps in his DOGE circle, Marko Elez recently resigned when it was revealed that he has a history of spewing racist and eugenicist rants under a pseudonym as recently as six months ago. What’s worse is that Musk has now started a poll suggesting that Elez should be re-hired and the current Vice President has endorsed the return of this young racist to work on the most sensitive payment systems within the Treasury Department.
Fork in the road
But what I really want to write about today is the ridiculous “Fork in the road” e-mail that was sent to all federal employees, chastising them as being low productivity and encouraging them to quit their jobs amid legally dubious promises of eight month severance and benefits packages. Musk sent the same e-mail, entitled “Fork in the road” to the staff of Twitter before firing 80% of the company’s staff and then stiffing them on their promised severance packages. As it turns out, Donald Trump has a history of the same behavior by stiffing contractors out of agreed upon payments for work completed for him. Birds of a feather…
Here’s the problem with the “deferred resignation” offer being made to federal employees, it isn’t working. As of the deadline to resign, only 60,000 employees had accepted the offer. That equals approximately 2.6% of the workforce. In a given year, around 200,000 federal employees leave their government jobs. Since this deferred resignation offer includes the period of February through September, any federal employee who be leaving during those eight months should take the deal. 200,000 / (8/12 months) = 132,000 feds would be leaving government during the resignation window. Since less than half of that number have accepted the deal, it is obviously a complete failure and is only paying out additional funds compared to just letting people retire or quit as planned.
In order for Musk’s “Fork in the road” to be any better than just letting people leave on their own, the number of acceptances to the offer would need to exceed 132,000 employees. But even then, if he gets 150,000 to resign, he has to pay all of them for eight months versus only the 18,000 who were motivated to resign beyond the typical number over an eight month time period.
Musk’s Incompetence
For this deal to make any financial sense for the government, it needs to attract at least double the number of employees than would typically retire or quit during the remainder of the fiscal year. That means anything less than around 270,000 resignations is a complete failure of Elon Musk and his DOGE team’s attempts to save the government money.
My question for Elon Musk and the DOGE children is why are you going after programs and employees that make up a tiny fraction of government spending? If this were truly about saving the government money, your first target should be The Pentagon where they can’t account for over $2 trillion worth of assets and can’t provide adequate records to reconcile their nearly $1 trillion annual operating budget. Maybe it’s because their intention is not to actually save the government money, but to gain control of its systems and provoke faux outrage over misconstrued financial data to further Trump’s control of government.