Five Bullets
Monday, February 24, 2025 10:41 pm Daniel J. Summers
Over this past weekend, the US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) sent an e-mail to all government civilian employees, directing them to reply, cc:ing their manager, with five bullet points highlighting what they had done during the prior week. These e-mails came in Friday afternoon late into Saturday. The message ended with a message that failing to reply by Monday at 11:59pm would be considered a resignation.
Several employees publicly expressed their reluctance to do this, and their complaints were met with “It's a simple request, why can't you just do it?” By the end of the weekend, the heads of the Departments of State and Defense, along with the FBI, had publicly announced that they had directed their employees to not reply.
My purpose here is to give some background as to “Why can't you just do it?”
The Timeline Is Wrong
Unlike military members, who are always on duty, most civilians are held to strict duty hours. An e-mail that comes in after they've left for the day won't be read until Monday morning - at which point this is going to preempt anything else they need to do because of the same-day deadline.
“So what, it's 5 minutes?” No, not really. People will have to think back to make sure they pick the five most consequential things they worked on, then they'll need to wordsmith it in a way that shows its impact and importance, yet does not reveal any sensitive information about the topic at hand. You might get it down to 5 minutes per bullet - but now you're at nearly half an hour. If this is about efficiency, we're going the wrong way.
The Consequence Is Wrong
Reply by 11:59pm or your silence is a resignation? First, I'd be very surprised if that's even legal, but I haven't looked into it. What it is, though, is terribly shortsighted and naive. According to the folks who sent that e-mail, I guess we can just lose anyone who was on vacation, in the hospital, or dealing with a family emergency on February 24th, 2025.
Think about the implied consequences as well. This is the same e-mail sender who send the “fork in the road” voluntary resignation letters less than a month ago. This is the same organization who has been methodically terminating new employees (carte-blanche releasing probationary employees is also naive; they aren't the problem). Now, this organization is going to have their own words that they can plug into who-knows-what keyword scanner - those things that are notorious for rejecting qualified applicants - to what ends? The thought is “Even if I do reply, I'm probably still fired.” (see above about more time spent crafting statements)
The Audience Is Wrong
OPM does not have the knowledge to evaluate these statements; in many cases, they may not even have the clearance to truly understand what the person did. The only thing they could do with it was the aforementioned keyword scanner or some other data analysis. “But they cc:d their manager, too!” The manager is the person who is responsible for tracking what his or her employees do week-to-week, and they do not need OPM's prompting on how to do their jobs.
The stated goal of this was to catch people who don't read their e-mail. There are better ways to figure that out than requiring thousands and thousands of man-hours for our civilian workforce, the majority of whom are doing what they're supposed to be doing. Do you know what can make that work suffer? Arbitrary instability - exactly what this demand caused.
p.s. I've long been an advocate for eliminating public-sector unions. The entire mindset of unions is organizing labor against their employer; in the case of public-sector unions, the employer is the American people. This stunt has shown there may be a good reason after all. I've been anti-union my whole life, and now I'm saying good things about them; that's pretty impressive, alleged purveyors of more efficient government.