To Increase Government Efficiency, Every Federal Employee Must Write an Email No One Will Read
“Billionaire Elon Musk issued an ultimatum to federal employees Saturday, saying in a post on his social media platform X that employees must respond to an email justifying the work they completed this week or resign.” — NBC News
The spirit of innovation is back in the White House. After decades of bureaucratic stagnation, the newly-created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been given a sweeping mandate to streamline operations and eliminate government waste, which is why I’m demanding that all three million federal workers stop what they’re doing and write an email that no one will read.
For too long, our federal workforce has been hampered by a lack of busy work, duplicative oversight, and administrative bullshit. That all ends today, as I’m requiring every VA nurse, NASA astrophysicist, and US postal inspector to write a status update email I couldn’t possibly understand and won’t, because again, I won’t be reading the emails.
In case I haven’t been clear: I will not be reading millions of emails from every single federal government employee. That would be a complete waste of time. What is important is for everyone on the federal payroll to stop doing counterintelligence or researching vaccines and shoot me your top five wins of the week, despite certain knowledge that your email will effectively be treated as spam.
I cannot overstate how much money we’ll save the American taxpayer by never opening the emails I’m forcing everyone to write. Let’s say it would take a DOGE employee five seconds to read an email and another five seconds to judiciously determine whether that employee should be illegally fired. That adds up to eight thousand precious hours of wasted government resources—eight thousand hours we’re saving you by skipping the “reading the emails” part.
And our quest for efficiency will not stop at the mass production of unread emails. I intend to mandate an endless variety of pointless, performative gruntwork that is somehow humiliating, even though it will never be witnessed by another human being. We will not stop until every federal worker spends every day shouting their job description from inside a soundproof closet. This is what the American people voted for. This will lower the price of eggs.
Okay, okay. I’ll admit that a tiny number of emails may get read. Maybe we’ll feed them to an AI, which will flag any forbidden words like “diversity” and “woman” so it can eventually be read by a racist DOGE bro. But I promise that the vast majority of the emails I’m asking everyone to write will remain completely unseen, aside from the employee who wrote it.
We appreciate everyone’s mandatory support in our effort to streamline the American government. If you have any suggestions, we ask that you carefully type them up, print them out, and place them in the trash yourself.
