The Productivity Cult That Broke The Federal Government

How Elon Musk ran into copy-paste culture

A few months ago, a friend of mine who works in one of those quietly vital but often overlooked corners of the US government sent me a screenshot.  

It was an email she had just sent to her supervisor titled “Weekly Accomplishments.” 

The body of the message was almost laughably brief: five bullet points, each some version of “Attended meeting / followed up / ongoing.” 

The kicker? 

She’d been sending the same email - virtually unchanged - for eight weeks. No one had said a word.

At first, I assumed it was a joke, another example of bureaucratic absurdity. But it wasn’t. My friend was caught up in one of the most bizarre and unintentionally hilarious attempts to reform government productivity in recent memory: a high-profile experiment led by Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The goal was to bring the breakneck pace of Silicon Valley into the slow, methodical world of federal administration. Predictably, it ended not in disruption, but in quiet farce.

Musk’s reform was simple in theory, but wildly naive in execution. Every federal employee - from junior analysts to senior officials - was ordered to submit a weekly email listing five things they’d accomplished. Miss a week, the order warned, and you’d be treated as if you’d resigned. The mandate was framed as a quick fix to the government’s notorious inertia, a digital whip to spur lagging productivity. But within days, the entire system began to unravel.

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) - the HR command centre of the federal government - held an emergency meeting just 48 hours after the announcement. Their internal guidance directly contradicted Musk’s memo: the email initiative was, in fact, voluntary. No disciplinary action would be taken for noncompliance. The directive, it turned out, was a paper tiger - loud on the surface, toothless beneath.

This meant that employees were being told two completely different things. From the top down, they were told the emails were mandatory, possibly career-ending if ignored. From within their departments, they were told not to worry, and that no one was likely to read them anyway. And the people at the very top - those who pushed for the emails in the first place - had no clear plan for what to do with the resulting flood of data.

To say the policy sowed confusion is an understatement. Across departments, chaos reigned. Some agencies like the NIH (National Institute of Health) quietly told staff to ignore the directive. Others, such as the Defence Department, built a convoluted system where individual reports were summarised by supervisors, then further condensed up the chain until the original content was all but erased. In practice, the whole exercise became a theatre of productivity: emails were sent, boxes were ticked, and no one seemed to care what was actually written.

Some employees responded with quiet rebellion. According to an article published by the Washington Post, a USDA worker began submitting their reports in Russian. A staffer at the Department of Housing and Urban Development used ChatGPT to generate reams of bureaucratic gibberish - 10 to 20 pages every week - just to see if anyone would notice. They didn’t.

To understand why this policy failed so spectacularly, you have to understand Musk’s management style. At Tesla, SpaceX, and X (formerly Twitter), he has long used weekly status reports as a way to monitor and pressure employees. In fast-moving startups, such tactics can drive short-term results. But trying to graft this model onto the US federal government - an institution with roughly 2.2 million employees and more red tape than a Victorian post office - is like trying to force a Formula 1 car onto a cobbled village road. The machinery simply isn’t built for it.

In many parts of government, work isn’t easily broken down into weekly accomplishments. Policy decisions take months. Regulatory reviews can stretch across fiscal years. The value of someone’s labour can’t always be captured in five bullet points. In the private sector, if you’re not shipping, you’re slipping. In the public sector, if you’re shipping too fast, you’re probably skipping steps - or laws.

The result was a kind of low-stakes rebellion: not through protest, but through parody. Staff complied just enough to avoid trouble, but not enough to take the policy seriously. They played the game, but only in the most literal sense. Like when schoolchildren realise their teacher isn’t marking homework, and begin submitting drawings of dinosaurs labelled as essays. The productivity cult had come to Washington - and Washington met it with the one resistance tactic it knows best: passive compliance.

By April, the email policy was already crumbling. Reports in the New York Times have suggested Musk is losing influence in the administration. Cabinet members are frustrated. The Treasury Secretary has complained when Musk had his preferred candidate installed to replace the acting commissioner of the IRS without Bessent’s support.

And behind closed doors, Musk was said to be planning his departure from DOGE by the end of May. His flagship reform - those five-point emails - now lives in a bureaucratic limbo. Some departments still enforce it. Others have let it quietly die. Most just go through the motions, as if pretending it matters is easier than publicly admitting it never did.

When I asked my friend if she was still sending her weekly accomplishments email, she laughed. “No,” she said. “Our boss told us to stop. Said it was optional now.” Had anyone ever responded to her earlier emails? “Not once,” she replied. “But I did start hiding Easter eggs in them. One week, all my bullet points were Spice Girls names.”

Musk may have wanted to make government work like a startup - fast, lean, and ruthlessly efficient. But instead, he collided with something more powerful than inefficiency: the stubborn inertia of a system designed to absorb pressure and change as little as possible. 

In Silicon Valley, performance metrics can drive innovation. In Washington, they often just create more paperwork. 

And in the end, when the productivity cult met the paper-pushing machine, it wasn’t a clash. It was a quiet shrug.