Diagnosing DOGE: Bullet Points

What is a retired federal employee’s take on the request from DOGE to submit five bullet points?

The Department on Government Efficiency (DOGE) recently stirred up considerable controversy when it used the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to send e-mails to all government employees demanding that they list five things they accomplished during the week. Do so, or resign!

The push back was considerable. The deadline passed and around a million federal employees did not respond to the ultimatum. A few of Trump’s appointed department heads even pushed the Pause button on this one.

Why was this controversial? Why the push back?

OPM

Part of the learning curve in working for the federal government is familiarity with acronyms. OPM is one which new employees immediately encounter, navigating this web of bureaucracy. OPM’s primary task is to gather data on every federal employee. This is primarily for tax purposes as well as benefits management and security. Every company has an HR department. The feds are no different.

After the first few weeks of employment, a federal worker will rarely encounter OPM. In my career, I worked 13 years with scarcely one visit per year to the OPM website. Payroll data confirmation was automated and I rarely had to call anyone. It wasn’t until I retired that I communicated directly with OPM, where an assigned specialist guided me through the rabbit hole of retirement.

So imagine how you would feel if your HR department sent you an e-mail asking you to provide a record of your work? This from people you scarcely knew? And this, from people you knew had little knowledge about the work you did on a day-to-day basis?

Just hold that thought.

Supervision

I can’t speak for the entire federal government, but I can share about my experience working in the US Forest Service (USFS). In the parlance of the federal bureaucracy, the USFS is an “agency” under the Department of Agriculture (USDA). In line of authority, OPM is absent except for guidelines regarding personnel management. The USFS is divided up between divisions that can either be national in scope (like the IT division I worked in) or regional in scope (which is about everybody else).

The USFS has an interesting history. For decades, it roughly ran like a military operation. That legacy remains in some form. Key to this is the scope of supervision. Supervisors are usually directly working with only a dozen people or so. While it is true that some supervisors may be running a group of a hundred employees, they usually work with a designated part of their staff who, in turn, supervise a smaller group.

This organizational arrangement explains some of the push back. The people who are responsible for evaluating the performance of an employee is that person’s immediate supervisor. As you can surmise, we are talking about a rather intimate cluster of twelve or so people. So you can imagine the consternation from both the supervisors and the employees when an e-mail comes from an agency (OPM) that they scarcely work with having to explain details of their work that their supervisors would otherwise know more about. The use of an impersonal e-mail from a distant branch of the government threatening your employment security is understandably disturbing. From the aspect of the supervisor, it seriously undercuts team morale.

The E-mail Trick

It has surfaced in the news reporting that there was an ulterior motive for using e-mail as the means of communicating a direct order to provide a list of five things you have accomplished during the previous week. It is a trick that I have used and many in the IT division of the USFS are familiar with. Send an e-mail about a significantly important issue that requires a quick response. In essence, “Is anybody home?”

I worked with a virtual team throughout my tenure in the Forest Service. I met few of the people face-to-face. Yet we bonded as a team and those friendships have endured beyond retirement. But it became abundantly clear that we had to diligently watch our e-mail and our chat service. It was part of our performance evaluation. We actually had something better than e-mail. We had a chat service called Microsoft Teams. The interesting thing about Teams was that it had a dot appearing next to each person’s name indicating if they were on-line or if their system was online but asleep. Having your system sleep during a lunch break was one thing, but if it was sleeping for hours at a time it indicated that you had not touched your system!

This technique proved instrumental in the termination of two contracted employees and one federal employee in my circle of contacts.

Microsoft Teams was used as a way to measure an employees performance.

But … this is the Forest Service. Put a bit of thought into this. In my experience, I worked with staff that did not read their e-mail for months! Yes, would you believe there are parts of the United States where the Forest Service has staff without WiFi or cell phone service? We had researchers, rangers and biologists in places where the only means of communication was a satellite phone. For months at a time. We had work crews working on trails and roads. And then there were the fire fighting crews. And then there were the skilled staff that worked at the District offices maintaining radios, trucks and heavy equipment: their jobs required little time on a computer. Their only time on the computer was the bi-weekly payroll record confirmation.

So this goes back to supervisors – and why it is best left with them. They would know.

The Five Bullet Points

As a federal and state employee I was quite familiar with the bullet points. At the USFS, my team met weekly and each of us went down the list of projects we were working on, addressing issues that had come up the previous week and planning for the week ahead. As Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt asserted, putting down five bullet points of what you did the previous week should take five minutes. And she’s right. It only takes five minutes.

But not everyone is wired that way. What is the mechanic going to say? I worked on five trucks? Even IT guys may have trouble coming up with five things. I have worked on one project that practically took up the entire week. For the guys working on a nature trail on a remote site – what would they say? “I worked my ass off all week?” I handled a skill saw? Or worse yet, they worked in a designated wildlife reserve where there were noise restrictions. “I spent hours with my partner working a two-handle buck saw.” Or the nature interpreter – “I spent each day walking six miles leading tours through the wilderness.”

I have been on the butt-end of an impersonal, disconnected work survey in the past. It was not a good experience. The person on the other end had little awareness of the nature of my work and they were using artificial standards, some of which did not apply. This goes back to the beginning, when a directive comes from a distant agency (OPM).

This was the major reason for the push back. Folks at DOGE need to trust the process. Leave this to the supervisors.

Lessons Learned

I have placed this discussion under the Lessons Learned series because it is a good example of how difficult it is to evaluate “performance.” Anyone reading this knows what I mean, whether you are working as a cook in a fast food restaurant or managing a forest. Evaluations are difficult.

First, there is the issue of trust. This affects both public and private sector organizations. You have to have some level of trust. The CEO cannot supervise everyone. So the organization is divided up amongst managers and supervisors where trust is required at each level. What is happening with DOGE is an example of a loss of trust. This is conceivable. I have worked with and under bad supervisors. I say that not because they were mean-spirited or abusive. They simply provided bad information and they permitted bad work practices to continue. The information they relayed up the corporate ladder was not accurate.

Second, there is the challenge of working remotely. This issue flared up the first week of the Trump presidency as it was announced that only 6% of the federal employees were showing up for work. While that figure is disputed, many federal employees work remotely or are eligible to do so. Measuring performance for remote work is a bit tricky, highly dependent on proxy data rather than direct observation. The USFS was actually short office space, so remote work was a solution for their Washington, DC staff. But the challenge remains — how do you measure performance? What are the work objectives? This becomes rather disconnected when you don’t actually see the person you are working with.

Third, the importance of clear evaluations. It is a part of the professional ethic to self-improve. Evaluations are a nuisance, but they can be helpful guideposts for future improvement. In the business world, the performance objectives can logically align with real-world cost-benefit measures. You may love your work. You may do very well at your work. But if it does not improve revenue or reduce costs, it is doomed. For the public side of the fence you can perform well at what is otherwise an irrelevant task.

Which now goes full circle. If you are a public employee, somebody must ask the question, “Is what you are doing relevant to the mission of the organization?” The elephant in the room is the massive public debt that is fueled by decades of overspending. So something will be cut and cut drastically. It revolves back to the core mission of the agency. Amongst all those bullet points, what supports that mission?