Is asking a federal worker what they accomplished illegal? (02-24-2025--Hour1)

[00:00:04] What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to 3 on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to thepetekalendershow.com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button, get every episode for free, write to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support.

[00:00:28] Elon Musk has apparently, or I don't know if it was actually from him or if it came from the Doge Dudes, the Musketeers or something, I don't know. But an email went out and it said everybody in the federal workforce has to write up sort of an explanation of what exactly would you say you do here?

[00:00:59] Elon Musketeers or something. And as you might imagine, outrage has ensued. Now, to be fair, okay, if I were to get this kind of an email from my management that said, hey, we are, you know, doing an audit or something, or we need to know what exactly you're filling your day with. Tell us, you know, five things that you did over the last week.

[00:01:26] Work-related things. What did you do? I am certain there would be some grousing and some grumbling and such. Perhaps even a bit of disgruntlement. But I would do it. I would probably just send a link to all, like, 15 episodes of the prior week's podcast and say, here you go. That's what I've been doing.

[00:01:54] But I am fluent in sarcasm. And so that's, you know, that might get me into some trouble if they ask me to do it. But here's the thing. I would do it. I would do it. Because that's the management request or requirement. They're asking, tell us what you got done. And see, here's the thing, too.

[00:02:16] Like, I obviously, you can tell if I've been on the air and you're my boss. You're going to know if I'm not on the air because you either had to find somebody to fill in for me or there was three hours of dead air. Right. So you're going to know what I'm doing. I would still write, you know, I did this. I did that.

[00:02:38] I did that. Five bullet points, you know, cranked out all of these shows, whatever. I would probably throw in more than five. You know why? It looks better. You know, like, well, we asked for five and he gave us like 30. That's fantastic. He's an overachiever. We're going to keep him on staff. See, because there is a recognition that the job is not mine. I am just simply holding this job.

[00:03:02] The job is the companies. And that is a that is a mindset that a lot of people in the private sector don't understand. But virtually 100 percent of the people in the public sector don't understand. It's not your job. You're just doing it. The job is the the governments. Right. If you're a teacher, that's the school district's job. And they have hired you to do it. It's not yours.

[00:03:33] OK, you don't own it. You can't dictate its terms. The employer does that. But. In the federal bureaucracy, a.k.a. the deep state, simply asking somebody what they did over the last five days is tantamount to a federal lawsuit worthy event. And in fact, there have been federal lawsuits now filed over this.

[00:04:00] I mean, imagine that simply sending an email saying, can you tell me five things that you accomplished last week as part of your job? And your response is to sue. And by the way, you don't get to include that in the list of your last week's accomplishments. OK, you cannot. I feel like that's a bit that would be like double dipping.

[00:04:21] OK. So the Associated Press in this story appeared at W.H.Y.Y. dot org, which is, I would assume, a an NPR affiliate. W.H.Y.Y. or why. Dot org. See if it was the private news company, then it would be dot com. So dot org indicates to me it's an NPR affiliate. So public radio.

[00:04:48] So here's how the AP reported it. Confusion and chaos loom as hundreds of thousands of federal employees begin their work week today, facing a deadline from President Donald Trump's cost cutting chief Elon Musk to explain their recent accomplishments or risk losing their jobs. Musk's unusual demand. And see, well, isn't that part of the problem right there, that it's an unusual demand?

[00:05:19] Shouldn't you know. Like things that you've accomplished over the last week. Right. If you go into the office and that doesn't count either simply showing up for work, although maybe for some people it it actually should count. You might want to put that on there, especially if you haven't been doing a lot of working in the office after they told you got to return to the office. But.

[00:05:43] Showing up to work and doing your job, simply doing your job would theoretically give you the list of the things that you've accomplished. Right. Because that's what you are hired to do. You're hired to do things and to perform certain tasks and to accomplish them. Hence, you would have a list. You would say I was hired to do X, Y, Z and I have done X, Y, Z. Over the last week, I did two X's, a Y and two Z's. Look at me.

[00:06:13] Fulfilling my tasks. That's it. This is not like the reaction to this has really been illustrative. Hasn't it? That. Oh, my God. I can't believe you're asking me what I do. You should always be asked what you're doing. That's what managers should be asking of all of their subordinates is what are you doing? Are you fulfilling your tasks?

[00:06:40] His unusual demand has faced resistance from several key U.S. agencies led by the president's loyalists. By the way, loyalists is a term that is never applied to Democrats. Just in case you were wondering about that. Loyalists and even Republicans. It's only Donald Trump that gets this term. Only Donald Trump hires loyalists.

[00:07:05] See, Democrats, when they make all of their appointments for ambassadors that gave them a bunch of money and people that love them, like, oh, no, no. We are to believe that it's only Donald Trump that hires loyalists. It's never anybody else. They always put people in positions that oppose them on everything. That makes sense.

[00:07:28] So some of these agency heads have instructed their employees not to comply. Lawmakers in both parties said Musk's mandate may be illegal while unions are threatening to sue. All because he said, tell me what you've gotten done in the last week. And like that's getting pushback.

[00:07:52] Musk's team sent an email to hundreds of thousands of federal employees, which, by the way, remember, there was a there was an argument, a legal argument as to whether or not you could even email all the employees. Government workers and the unions and the agencies were like, you cannot even send an email to your workforce. Again, imagine this. The president is in charge of the executive branch.

[00:08:16] And if the president or his delegated representative wants to send a message to all the workforce, they should be allowed to do so. I don't understand why this is so controversial. Now, depending on what's in that message, like you can't send a message and fundraise. Right. But if you're sending a message to all federal workers to let them know like, hey, we're going to be doing cake in the office on Thursday, whatever.

[00:08:45] Like if it's workplace related, then, you know, jeans Friday for, you know, for everybody. Again, like it may not be the best use of your time, but you should be able to send those messages. You're the boss. And people are like, we're going to sue if you send me an email. Like, guys, do you understand anything about what happens out here in private sector land, a.k.a. the real world?

[00:09:15] Do you even understand how this stuff goes? We get emails. I will tell you people in this building and not since I have arrived, but I have heard the stories of the the rambling emails that would be sent out to employees. That people didn't even understand what was being said. Like, this is something that happens all the time in the private sector. Bosses send emails to their subordinates.

[00:09:44] And they have the ability to do that. And they're actually able to ask them, what have you done over the last week? You can ask that question as a boss. All right. If you're listening to this show, you know, I try to keep up with all sorts of current events. And I know you do, too. And you probably heard me say, get your news from multiple sources. Why? Well, because it's how you detect media bias, which is why I've been so impressed with Ground News.

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[00:11:10] In the real world, this would be called billable hours. Yes. I don't know what's wrong with the bell there. Oh, it was stuck on a cord. There we go. Better. Better. Whether it be maintenance, engineering, legal, medical, et cetera, et cetera, you get the idea, productive types. Now, maybe in the federal sector, some do 15 minutes of work a week and watch porn the rest of the week. I got that thought from a high-level IT guy, by the way. Right.

[00:11:38] Do you remember they had to put out some sort of a directive or something? Remember where they found like all of these federal employees that were watching porn on their company or government laptops? Remember that? That was, oh gosh, probably 10 years ago or something. But yeah, so if you're not aware of this, and I forget what the exact breakdown is, but I want to say, well, in the paralegal field, okay?

[00:12:08] And, well, in the paralegal field, you have to mark all of your time. And they do it by like six-minute intervals or something like that. Did you know that? They keep a clock. So they can count however many units of the hour because then they bill the client for work that is done.

[00:12:35] So if you're going to work for an entire hour nonstop on somebody's case, then you get like 10 units of six minutes apiece or something like that. Or maybe it's six units of 10 minutes apiece. I forget the breakdown. But they literally keep clocks. You think punching a clock, you know, coming in and leaving for the day with an in and out for lunch or something, you think that's tough?

[00:13:01] How about every six minutes or 10 minutes you're having to keep track of your time? See, like, again, this is what, and I recognize, I probably don't have the softest shoulder to cry on. Every single job has its tradeoffs. They all have pros and cons. The question is, do the pros outweigh the cons for you?

[00:13:25] And if you are miserable in your job and all the cons outweigh all the pros, then you should find something else to do. And then I'm reminded of the saying that, I think it was Jordan Peterson maybe, who said, the toughest thing you've ever been through is the toughest thing you've ever been through. And, right, this is a problem when you have people that have never actually been through anything tough.

[00:13:53] And then they melt when they get an email that says, hey, tell us what you did. Give us your list of accomplishments over the last week or two. Like, what have you been working on? And they're trying to figure out whether you are actually doing any work whatsoever. I got a tweet here. It's a Pete tweet. Yeah, I forget.

[00:14:21] Well, I think it was a couple of days ago. But they pointed out the similarity going on here with when Pat McCrory became governor of North Carolina. And he came onto my show at the time and he was telling me how he actually went out and visited some of the agencies and departments. And he would walk through to see them.

[00:14:51] He said people, there were people that went and hid under desks from him. Because they did not want him to know that they had been assigned into a particular department or agency. Right? This is a patronage system. Right? That's what they were trying to avoid detection of, a patronage system. Where you put people on the state payroll that are not qualified to be there but know somebody or something.

[00:15:21] And they get the job. And maybe they don't have to do very much. But it's employment. It keeps them employed. And they are grateful to whoever it was that gave them that job. And so they make political contributions. And this has been going on in our state for over 150 years. This was the patronage system that the Democrat machine built during Reconstruction and after. And that's the point of this exercise. Let me get back to a couple more emails here.

[00:15:50] Dennis says, just imagine how freaked out these government snowflakes would be if Elon said they all had to show up at their respective job locations for a single day. OMG. And Dave says, letting the boss know what you have been doing is pretty normal. I don't know why this is such a big deal. I spent 22 years in the Air Force and we had EPRs, enlisted performance reports, every year.

[00:16:18] I think a lot of civilian companies have yearly similar reports on employees too. Some of our lazier supervisors who did not keep track of subordinates would ask what they've done when a report was due. I always kept track of my duties, accomplishments, etc. when I knew my EPR was due. Right. Like, this is a common way to measure what the workforce is accomplishing.

[00:16:48] Um, Ikifu on the Twitter machine says, if you're really working, the hard part would be putting it all down. At any one time, I am probably working on three to five things. And Melissa says, this is why I've always believed the year-end review process should be eliminated. A good manager knows what and how their staff are doing, if not on a daily basis, then minimally a weekly basis. Right. Well, but here's the thing, right?

[00:17:16] We've all had bad managers and that happens and they don't do this kind of stuff. And, you know, I've been in situations where, you know, the latest edict comes down from on high and, you know, you get people scrambling and scurrying to comply. And, you know, after a while you realize, yeah, just, you know, give it four or five months. They will have forgotten about this too, just like they have all of the other things. Right. Right.

[00:17:41] But as, but when you, but when you have a new administration coming in, when you have a new company that takes over or whatever, they're going to do a review of the entire operation to see what people are doing and what their jobs are. And they're going to look for efficiencies. And that's what Doge is doing. The E in Doge stands for efficiency. This should not be a surprise. Here's a great idea.

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[00:19:21] All right, so the Elon Musk Doge team sent out an email to hundreds of thousands of federal employees on Saturday. So they probably didn't even see the email. The workers probably didn't even see the email until this morning. But they got 48 hours to report five specific things they had accomplished last week.

[00:19:43] In a separate message on X, Musk said any employee who failed to respond by the deadline, said in the email as 11.59 p.m. tonight, would lose their job. Okay. So you have to respond. Now, if you were on vacation, I assume that you just say, I was on vacation. Right? Mass confusion. Now, here's the other thing, though. I got an email. Right?

[00:20:08] From Jeff, who says, part of the point here also is to confirm that there is actually a living, breathing person, you know, doing the job, drawing a paycheck. Right? Lest it be laundered down some black hole that perhaps end up in an LLC owned by Hunter Biden. Like, that's... That is a concern. No, seriously.

[00:20:34] If you've got people that are not responding to any emails, you might not actually have a person in that position. And so this is kind of like an audit. Todd says, why would the federal government employees not want to use this chance to show all they do and show how they should be making even more money? Right? Like, yeah. Here's... Do you want the hack for this, by the way? Okay.

[00:21:04] If you're a federal employee and you are agonizing over how exactly to come up with a list of the bullet points of all your accomplishments, here's the hack. All right? Here's the cheat code. Go pull up the solicitation for the job. Go pull up your job description. And just copy and paste that.

[00:21:35] Because they put out the requirements like, hey, we're looking for somebody that's going to do this and this and this and this. And you just take that and put it into your response. Back to the Associated Press story. Mass confusion. Cats and dogs living together followed on the eve of the deadline as some agencies resisted the orders. Others encouraged their workers to comply. And still others offered conflicting guidance.

[00:22:00] One message on Sunday morning from the Department of Health and Human Services, led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., instructed its 80,000 employees to comply. That was shortly after the acting general counsel, Sean Keveney, had instructed some not to.

[00:22:18] And by Sunday evening, agency leadership issued new instructions that employees should, quote, pause activities related to the request until, well, about half an hour ago. Noon. I don't know why they're pausing it, but. Newly confirmed FBI Director Cash Patel, an outspoken Trump ally, instructed employees to ignore Musk's request, at least for now.

[00:22:45] Now, quote, the FBI, through the office of the director, is in charge of all of our review processes and will review, will conduct reviews in accordance with FBI procedures. When and if further information is required, we will coordinate the responses for now. Please pause any responses. Now, the other thing here is like how many employees are there in the federal government? There's hundreds of thousands of them, right?

[00:23:15] Would you like, can you imagine what that inbox must look like? When, if you get like half of the employees to respond, you're going to, there's no way you're going to be able to read all those emails. Department of State, Department of Defense, and Department of Homeland Security. They wrote in an email that essentially the department leadership would respond on behalf of the workers.

[00:23:45] Musk, on Sunday, called his latest request, quote, a very basic pulse check. Quote, the reason this matters is that a significant number of people who are supposed to be working for the government are doing so little work that they are not checking their email at all. In some cases, we believe non-existent people or the identities of dead people are being used to collect paychecks.

[00:24:14] In other words, there is outright fraud. So, once again, the pushback to this is instructive, right? And this is why I think you guys are not winning hearts and minds, not the Doge people. Anybody that works in the private sector has had stuff like this happen to them at some point in their career. Virtually everybody, right?

[00:24:41] In a professional, white-collar environment, this kind of stuff occurs. And, you know, some of it is sort of the latest thing I'll never forget. The first time I encountered, like, this phenomena was the fishes over at the Mecklenburg County DSS, Department of Social Services. And there was a guy that led the agency. His name was Jake Jacobson.

[00:25:09] And he had apparently done some, like, management training course or something like that. And it was all built around throwing fishes. And so they had all these, like, stuffed animals, you know, like these dolls, like these fish dolls. And they would toss them around the office, right? So there were all sorts of these. It came out of, like, the Seattle fish market thing where they're like, you know, it only works if there's a team and everyone, like, you got to work together and throw the fish and whatever.

[00:25:38] You know, getting people, it's a team building thing. It's like they take you out to the ropes course. And like, all right, everybody, now you're going to stand here and catch the boss as they fall backwards, you know. That kind of thing. Again, some of them may be effective. Some of them are not. But this kind of pulse check thing happens pretty frequently. And your reaction is so over-the-top insane, employees, that you're not winning any converts to your cause. You know, stories are powerful.

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[00:27:01] And they will tell others to come who you are. Visit creativevideo.com. Trent sends a tweet. It's a Pete tweet. He says, I have no sympathy for these workers. I'm fence sub. Fence, maybe feds. I don't know. Fence sub and get paid by the job and have to report progress every week on Thursday to get paid. I haven't had a vacation in six years.

[00:27:31] My dad had a quadruple bypass last year and came back in a month. Bunch of babies. So that's what I mean. You're not winning people over to your cause. You're not gaining sympathy. By literally filing lawsuits when somebody asks you, what exactly do you say you do here? The Trump administration also,

[00:28:01] this is WSOC-TV, but it's the Associated Press story. The Trump administration moved its fast-paced dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, toward what appeared to be its final phases, telling all but a fraction of staffers worldwide that they were on leave as of today and notifying at least 1,600 of the U.S.-based staffers they were being fired.

[00:28:30] The move was the latest and one of the biggest steps in what President Donald Trump and cost-cutting ally Elon Musk say is their goal of gutting the six-decade-old Aid and Development Agency in a broader campaign to slash the size of the federal government. The move comes after a federal judge on Friday allowed the administration to move forward with its plan to pull thousands of USAID staffers off the job in the U.S. and around the world.

[00:29:00] The district judge, Carl Nichols, rejected pleas in a lawsuit from employees to keep temporarily blocking the government's plans. So that got lifted on Friday, which we had said when I went over this stuff last week, we talked about all of these different court cases or these stays, the request for stay, right? Temporary restraining orders.

[00:29:30] They run to a judge that they think is sympathetic and they're like, you know, don't let them enforce this thing. The district judge says, okay, well, I'm going to put in a temporary restraining order and then issue some sort of an injunction that covers the entire country even though it's just one group of plaintiffs in one venue and one judge. It's lawfare. And the Supreme Court, members of the Supreme Court, have taken a very dim view

[00:30:00] of this kind of proliferation of this tactic. So here's the judge saying on Friday that, no, we're not going to keep blocking the government's plan. As of 1159 p.m. last night, so Sunday night into Monday morning today, all USAID direct hire personnel with the exception of designated personnel responsible for mission-critical functions,

[00:30:30] core leadership, and or specially designated programs will be placed on administrative leave globally. That's according to the notice that was sent out to USAID workers and that the Associated Press saw. At the same time, the agency said in the notices to staffers that it was beginning a firing process called a reduction in force or a RIF. I've been RIF'd twice in my life.

[00:31:01] I can have sympathy for people that are going through this. There is no reason to be cruel to people that, you know, applied for a job, took a job, they were doing a good job, so they thought, and then they get let go. Right? These are people with families to support, with mortgages and the like. So I'm not celebrating the hardship that people are now

[00:31:30] going to face when they get let go. I never do. But I also am not going to go tell them to go learn to code as a lot of people in the media told all those guys that got laid off with the Keystone Pipeline project. Right? When Biden came in and shut that down. Right? When manufacturing and blue-collar jobs get shut down or lost or shipped overseas or whatever and the response from the media and sort of the quote establishment

[00:32:00] has been to, well, you know, you could learn to code. And it became this response that was thrown at blue-collar workers when their jobs were downsized out of existence than when they were riffed and then, of course, you know, when reporters get laid off then people were responding to the reporters with the same learn to code

[00:32:29] line and then, of course, they got, you know, censored on social media. Literally, the phrase learn to code was banned on certain platforms because it wasn't nice. See, so it's the same thing, by the way, that is going on with the immigration debate. If these types of journalism jobs and political jobs, white-collar jobs, if these jobs were being gutted and taken by illegal immigrants

[00:32:59] for much lower costs and journalists were being thrown out of work, there would be a completely different perspective on the way these stories get covered. And that's why you got Trump. The administration gave no explanation for a discrepancy in the total headcount. I thought this was one last interesting point, that it was a firing process called the RIF that would eliminate 2,000 U.S.-based jobs. A version of the notice that was posted on the website, though, put the number

[00:33:29] of jobs to be eliminated at 1,600. So we don't know why there is that, why there is a discrepancy of some 400 jobs. Trump and Musk contend that USAID's work is wasteful and furthers a liberal agenda. So, no, it's not a liberal agenda. It's a leftist, progressive, globalist, Marxist agenda. That's what we're doing. Oh, and by the way, it's a jobs

[00:33:58] program for Democrats. Democrats. That's another reason why. And the programs that you are funding with taxpayer dollars are not something that USAID should be funding in the first place. So, it's not just liberal agenda. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast. So, if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my

[00:34:28] Patreon page or go to thepetecalendorshow.com. Again, thank you so much for listening and don't break anything while I'm gone.