Consider America’s roughly 14,000 Federal Aviation Administration air-traffic controllers. If each of them spends just 10 minutes opening their work email, finding this request, drafting a response, proofreading it, and sending it off, that adds up to 2,333 hours of work. Can you think of a more cartoonish example of government waste than using 292 workdays’ worth of man-hours to clarify that, last week, air-traffic controllers monitored airplanes?

Did they all? Can you showcase that each one actually did the job of an ATC? Can you showcase that each ATC does not waste more than 10 mins per day? No? Funny that

I actually can think of a more cartoonish example, in that it is even bigger in scale: Some 74,000 U.S. Postal Service letter carriers deliver mail on foot, making roughly $29 an hour on average. If they spend 10 minutes each, or 740,000 total minutes, drafting emails, that works out to nearly $360,000 in labor costs. For what? And how long will it take other workers to read “I was delivering letters” 74,000 times?

You mean the Post Office that loses billions each year? Why are they making more than many college graduates delivering mail on foot? Why cant someone making $29 dollars an hour justify that expense?

Any American can identify many more categories of federal employees whose job duties are known to all. We know what TSA agents do. We know what nurses do. An efficient process would obviously exempt all such categories.

Waste time and money while failing massively in regards to the TSA or the worst healthcare outcomes to the point veterans go out of their way to get community care in regards to VA nurses?

Other federal employees of course have less legible job duties, and I do not doubt that some of them accomplished next to nothing of value last week and ought to be fired. But there is no reason to believe that any of those employees will be truthful about their own uselessness, or that untruthful emails will be detected as such. This gambit is more likely to reward bullshitting persuasively via email than actual service to taxpayers.

Because the bullshiters are just too intelligent to be caught making things up right?! Just like your “article” was clearly too intelligent to not be instantly rebuked?

“The reason this matters is that a significant number of people who are supposed to be working for the government are doing so little work that they are not checking their email at all!” Musk also wrote, as if checking email is a reliable measure of productivity in all public-sector jobs. If you’re a NASA employee doing maintenance on a remote telescope, or a Department of Labor employee traveling to far-flung coal mines to assess their safety, or a Coast Guard employee patrolling a patch of ocean, or an NSA employee trying to hack the personal device of a foreign general, checking email irregularly could as easily show that you’re working hard as that you’re hardly working.

Yes because remote workers…. Never check their email which is why they know exactly what remote sites need repairs. Also what coast guard “employee” is deploying on patrol? And what is the NSA agent doing said hacking from again? Amazing how each made up scenario is vastly dependent on… using their computer.