Question: What do you do when dealing with a dysfunctional organization?

Answer: Question everything. And then measure everything.

Anyone who has succeeded in an assignment to revitalize a dysfunctional organization knows the importance of these steps. And anyone who has succeeded in such an assignment will recognize the reason for Elon Musk's e-mail to workers within the federal bureaucracies. And any of those who have even attempted to rescue such organizations will recognize the motives behind those who get outraged over any questions, let alone the development of metrics.

To show just how not novel this approach is, it got satirical treatment in the seminal 1999 film Office Space with The Bobs (via my good friend Cranky T-Rex, who convinced me to watch the film):

Private-sector corporations have done this for decades. (I've had three such assignments in the my previous career.) Each situation is unique and the causes vary widely, so the first step in addressing failure and dysfunction from the outside is to question everything. Once that process begins, the next step is to measure everything in the context of the organization's intended deliverables to determine what -- and who -- actually works. 

That's certainly one reason for Musk's upcoming e-mail demand for an explanation of work accomplished, but it's not the only reason, as we'll shortly see:

Consistent with President @realDonaldTrump’s instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week.

Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 22, 2025

This is an absolutely reasonable request in any organization, dysfunctional or not, and hardly burdensome. As many quipped, if you can't list a few bullet points of the work you did in an entire week, you're probably not working at all. This kind of scrutiny usually prompts unhappy reactions from those who don't work and their allies, such as the retiring-none-too-soon Senator Tina Smith (D-MN):

I bet a lot of people have had an experience like this with a bad boss - there’s an email in your inbox on Saturday night saying, “Prove to me your worthiness by Monday or else.”

I’m on the side of the workers, not the billionaire asshole bosses.

— Senator Tina Smith (@SenTinaSmith) February 23, 2025

Ahem. Smith is supposed to be on the side of the taxpayers in Minnesota, not the bureaucrats in Washington DC. And the name-calling is another dead giveaway as to the sources of dysfunction in organizational reform, too, as it points out the immature players that likely are the most frightened of actual accountability. 

Besides, as Musk explained, the first question he wants answered is how many workers actually, y'know, exist. It's a "pulse check," a first-order measurement by e-mail response, which the scale of the organizations makes necessary:

Amid the uproar within the federal government, Musk defended the missive as a “very basic pulse check.”

“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!” he contended on X amid a firestorm.

Musk means "pulse check" in both the literal and figurative senses. First off, he wants to know how many on the federal payroll actually exist, and then how many answer e-mails from senior executive-branch officers. Musk has been tasked with the reform effort by the president directly, and so operates under the authority Trump has to oversee the executive branch. If these bureaucrats don't respond to these e-mails as directed, they probably aren't responding to directives at all. That makes them either insubordinate, derelict of duty, or both -- and either are firing offenses, subject to the normal civil-service processes. 

Musk has taken the first basic steps to bring accountability to these organizations, nothing more. The absurd reactions demonstrate just how foreign the concept of accountability has been to these federal bureaucracies, especially accountability to the elected president on whose authority they rely. It's even more absurd than Richard Riehle's hilarious overreaction to The Bobs in the clip above. (Riehle gives a memorable performance in Office Space as Tom.) 

Having no real argument against accountability, the unions that represent these workers and Democrats in Congress have resorted to ad hominem attacks on Musk, with Smith's being a particularly immature and inane example. Some Democrats have begun to argue that Musk lacks the intelligence or the skills for organizational reform, both of which are patently absurd. As Noah Smith pointed out yesterday, Musk is not just a mathematical genius but also an organizational genius -- as he has proven repeatedly while amassing the greatest fortune in the world:

Seth Abramson could not build SpaceX, or Tesla, or any of the things Musk has built, no matter how much money someone handed him. Neither could I, dear reader, and neither could you. Neither, I think, could Terence Tao, or any of the other highest-IQ supergenius mathematicians on the planet.1 Any of us could spend a lifetime and burn a trillion dollars and probably not end up with anything remotely resembling Musk’s high-tech industrial behemoths.

Why would we fail? Even with zero institutional constraints in our way, we would fail to identify the best managers and the best engineers. Even when we did find them, we’d often fail to convince them to come work for us — and even if they did, we might not be able to inspire them to work incredibly hard, week in and week out. We’d also often fail to elevate and promote the best workers and give them more authority and responsibilities, or ruthlessly fire the low performers. We’d fail to raise tens of billions of dollars at favorable rates to fund our companies. We’d fail to negotiate government contracts and create buzz for consumer products. And so on. ...

I’ve been watching Elon succeed at building seemingly impossible companies and driving them to new heights of success for over a decade. And at every turn, there were hecklers on social media calling him an idiot, a fraud, and a huckster, and claiming that his companies were about to collapse and die. Although Elon didn’t deliver on every promise he ever made, again and again he has made his hecklers eat their words.

And Elon did this in spite of the entire apparatus of American proceduralism and anti-development policy being against what he was trying to do.

Noah has more great points with more specific examples. However, one just has to look at Twitter/X to grasp Musk's talent and organizational skills. Musk overpaid for Twitter and many people assumed that it would sink his fortune. When Musk began shutting down thousands of jobs, critics assumed the platform would collapse. Instead, Twitter/X barely missed a beat while Musk slashed operating costs on a massive scale, retaining personnel who wanted to orient themselves toward profit and customer service and dumping the activists. 

Can Musk do the same with the federal bureaucracy? The challenge is exponentially tougher than Musk faced at Twitter/X, SpaceX, or anywhere else. But Musk clearly has succeeded in red-teaming dysfunction orgs in the past, and he's following the proper path to kick-start the first ever at-scale reform of the federal bureaucracy since Woodrow Wilson largely created it. And if Musk wasn't being effective, we wouldn't be hearing the screaming taking place now.

"What would you say you do here" is a question that federal bureaucrats better get used to answering ... or start looking for work elsewhere. And they will soon find out that such scrutiny is the norm, not the exception, in most other industries.