explained the obvious purpose of the email: to identify federal workers who are so useless that this simple task is a burden for them
But what if they aren't answering not because it's a burden, but because they don't know if they should? I'd genuinely hope that, if someone in the government receives a third party email asking them to list what they did in the previous week, they wouldn't respond.
The other issue is you're using the "Bobs" assumption. In Office Space, the department willingly brought in the Bobs to fire their employees. They were working together. DOGE isn't working alongside the departments, hence the confusion and issues where you have two sides saying different things. Your boss is telling you "don't respond" while a third party is saying "respond"
And there's still the fear issue. What if you have people who are obviously aware of what DOGE is up to who lie about what they did in the previous week, knowing that DOGE is too unqualified to call their bluff? If we're trying to weed out poor employees, do we really want to fire those who are cautious/listen to management, but keep around potentially lazy and dishonest employees?
It's a shotgun approach to something that should require a scalpel. First, you figure out what managers are worth their salt, then you work your way down the line. If a manager isn't doing their job, you need to figure out what to do with them. If the manager is doing their job, get a list of employees under them who can potentially be cut and weed out those applicants. Right now, the current approach is meaningless because you could be hitting vital employees with otherwise perfect records who are simply concerned about an outside party asking about their job. And depending on what they do in the government, this might be a very reasonable response. You could also be missing some obvious red flags who are savvy enough to lie and bloat their accomplishments simply because they want to keep collecting a paycheck.
Comically enough, I'd also say this approach does the exact opposite for DOGE and it makes it seem like they're the lazy employees who don't really know what they're doing because of their amateur "Gotcha" attempt. Again, using the Bobs as an example, imagine if instead of meeting with employees to take notes on their performances, they just sent an email asking the employees if they should be fired or not, then brought that back to the department heads that hired them in the first place. The reason that one middle manager dude was ultimately fired, even though he kept saying he was important and vital for customer service or whatever, is precisely because during the interview they could call him out and identify that his role was redundant. Which is precisely why they put him on the chopping block. We're given the impression he was genuinely doing *something*, but the issue was the something didn't matter. Which is what you want to cut, employees that serve non-vital tasks. Not employees who don't answer a phishing-tier level email from an unaffiliated third party.
Or to put it in outdated meme terms that Elon Musk would use, it's like sending a picture to all employees asking if the dress is gold or blue, and firing everyone who says blue.
