Though it seems like a million years ago, one of shadow president Elon Musk’s earliest—and stupidest—ideas was making every member of the federal workforce send a weekly email with five things they had accomplished. That requirement is fading away, but while Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is absolving his civilian employees from future five-things emails, they have one last task: helping “improve the Department’s efficiency or root out waste.”
This is, of course, an unhinged thing to ask of the more than 700,000 civilian workers at the Defense Department. First, it shares the same problem as the government-wide five-things email: What about people who work with sensitive government information? How would they summarize their work in an unclassified way? Of course, given that Hegseth is very relaxed about sharing classified data, maybe that’s not a concern.
What is a concern for the employees who have to answer this mandatory email—an email where there is no assurance that their responses will be anonymous—is that Hegseth has a very narrow idea of what constitutes the sort of inefficiency, waste, or fraud that he’d like eliminated.
To be fair, the DOD email does say that examples of waste could be things like “the internet doesn’t work on Tuesday,” “these regulations don’t make sense,” or “this weapons system doesn’t work.” However, even just taken at face value, these examples are absurd. What exactly would one do with a complaint as vague as “these regulations don’t make sense”? Do random DOD employees really know which weapons systems don’t work, but higher-ups at DOD are clueless? How are intermittent internet outages remotely comparable to defective weapons systems?
These are the sorts of questions that get generated by people who have no idea what they are doing in their high-level agency job.
Actual surveys of federal employees look something like the Defense Business Board’s 2023 report on improving IT user experience at the DOD. It runs 118 pages, comprises survey responses from thousands of employees, provides various metrics by which to measure end-user satisfaction, has a section explaining research methodologies, and a lengthy bibliography of relevant publications.
Compare that to Hegseth’s DOD asking all employees for a range of complaints from, basically, “my router doesn’t work” all the way to “all F-35 fighters do not work.” That shows a toddler-level understanding of the duties of DOD employees, as if everyone has equal experience and equal knowledge to poke at random programs and call them wasteful.
There’s also the issue that no employee who wants to keep their job is likely to tell Hegseth about real waste at the DOD. Hegseth’s idea of waste is anything that isn’t designed for straight, white, cisgender soldiers exclusively. He’s got some writer flunky over on the DOD website who pops off fawning pieces bragging about how the so-called Department of Government Efficiency has found $80 million in waste at the DOD, but what qualifies as “waste” is basically just diversity and climate initiatives. Also, $80 million in savings works out to about 0.009% of the DOD’s 2024 budget of $841 billion. Such efficiency!
Hegseth was so hyped to cut anything with “women” in the title that he proudly axed the Women, Peace, and Security program even though it was signed into law by Trump. But even having such a distinguished right-wing pedigree wasn’t enough to save the program from Hegseth, because ladies.
He’s so thickheaded that he oversaw a purge of DOD websites so sloppy that the agency deleted a picture of the B-29 bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, because that bomber was named “Enola Gay.” He’s also fired all the top-level military personnel he thinks are woke, but really, it just means he’s firing women and Black people who have succeeded in the military because he deeply believes they should not be there.
Hegseth is at the DOD to be a professional racist and committed Christian nationalist, not to run a Cabinet agency efficiently. Don’t expect him to take up any employee suggestions unless they advance his racist and misogynist goals.
