Administrative Terrorism

Last Saturday afternoon, when most federal workers were home for the weekend, Elon Musk’s hijacked Office of Personnel Management sent out an email to employees asking them to provide "approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager.” On X Musk added that: "Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation."

The Trump administration has taken a lot of dumb, cruel, and short-sighted actions in its first 39 days, but this took the cake as the weirdest and seemingly least likely to be a real thing (to the extent that reality has meaning anymore with this regime). It just didn’t make any sense. Why did it come out over the weekend? Why did OPM put a two-day time limit on the response time? Who could possibly read and evaluate the emails even if they were sent back?

And what about Musk’s threat to fire anyone who didn’t comply? Aside from its plain illegality, it is a literally insane way to reduce a workforce. Instead of firing non-critical personnel who kept the government functioning, it would randomly prune essential workers. The whole thing was so bizarre and unbelievable that within hours departments within the government—who of course had no prior heads up—began telling their staff to ignore the email, including the DOJ.

Everyone wondered: was this anything more than a little spur-of-the-moment trolling by a ketamine-addled mind? (Trump, whose mental stability has never been a strength, later piled on, saying: "Those million people that haven't responded, though [to] Elon, they are on the bubble ... maybe they're gonna be gone.“) Like so much in the second Trump administration, it had a the quantum reality of Schrödinger’s cat, both true and actionable and pure fantasy at the same time.

Going after workers randomly doesn’t make any sense if you’re thinking about efficiency or the deficit. Payroll only accounts for about 6% of the federal budget, and indiscriminately firing workers will make the government less efficient, not more. But that misses the point.

The chaos isn’t a failure to implement a coherent plan: the chaos is the plan. The strategy here—spelled out in Project 2025—is wrecking the “deep state,” and its core is the federal workforce.

DOGE’s is committed to dismantling the federal government (what they call “the administrative state”). It’s a radical but decades-old effort to gut the federal government and radically scale back regulations, protections, and any programs that benefit the poor or non-White. Tick through the list of agencies and you see functions that conservatives oppose outright, want to farm out to the private sector, or take over to enhance their own power and/or wealth.

Standing in their way are people were drawn to civil service precisely to ensure those protections and programs. I have a good friend who works as a suicide-prevention counselor at the VA, working to keep traumatized vets alive. Others are invested in funding research into disease cures, or making sure our roads and bridges don’t crumble, or finding better ways to educate our kids, or keeping planes from crashing into each other. Many of them could have made more money working in the private sector, but for them money wasn’t a primary life goal—improving the world was.

Elon does not understand this. He thinks of public service as a refuge for the mediocre, those who can’t cut it in the private sector. When OPM offered federal workers a sack of cash to quit, he no doubt expected a flood of resignations. Of course, it turns out the workers didn’t get into their jobs for sacks of money, and weren’t going to quit for them, either.

What has transpired since then is a campaign of administrative terrorism to get them to quit. DOGE hasn’t explicitly threatened them with physical harm, but the legal and financial menace is everywhere. DOGE has used the threat of firing to bully workers by accessing their personal and employment records, doxing them (which is tinged with violence), targeting certain classes of workers under the rubric of DEI, or when they can, undermining the very agencies that gave their work meaning. 

Perhaps in another post I can discuss the whole background behind the comservative antipathy to the federal government, but dismantling it is the real purpose of firing all these workers. The function of government will grind to a halt if enough people leave. And since they won’t leave on their own, Musk is deploying this administrative terrorism to force them out.

So far, federal employees have shown incredible resilience and mettle in standing fast. The courts have been somewhat supportive of the workers, but DOGE has also managed to find pressure points, firing vulnerable workers still working on probationary contracts, or claiming they have bad performance records. So, since the chaos is the point, it will continue. If you understand what the real intention is, these tactics start to make sense.