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Yes, DOGE efforts are highly irregular, and massively disruptive to government agencies. That’s kinda the point. Your analysis of the email thing is somewhat superfluous, because we already knew that the DOGE exists precisely to get the government out of the ruts it’s been stuck following. And, of course, nobody is surprised that many employees don’t like it.
Sounds like an attempt at percussive maintenance. I thought the whole point of DOGE was to get a team of smart outsiders led by a certified genius to fix government inefficiency - this is the opposite.
I'm not sure they are necessarily at odds. Musk seems pretty famous for prioritizing speed over getting things right the first time and yet this doesn't stop him from not only getting things right but getting them right faster than others. For instance, IIRC he spent millions on complex machinery for Starship before deciding that it should be made out of stainless steel and had to basically eat the loss; Starship is still poised to be the heaviest-lift reusable rocket ever built at a time when other reusable rockets are still struggling to compete with Starship's smaller predecessors.
Anyway, I don't take for granted that Musk is necessarily making the best decisions or the right ones in his newest venture, but I also don't think that "smart outsiders led by a certified genius" and "percussive maintenance" are at odds inherently.
I'm a huge fan of this Musk philosophy in his engineering ventures. Testing often-too-flawed engineering ideas as fast as you can is much cheaper and much faster than trying to come up with something flawless on the first try, and seemingly-ironically it tends to give you a less flawed final product too. I'm not sure how well that works with people rather than objects The fourth Falcon 1 wasn't working while scared that mistakes had been made that blew up the first three. The Falcon 9 landing engines weren't going to change careers because SpaceX tried out parachutes first. The machine-welded stainless steel Starship tanks aren't going to quit and find a job where composite tanks and hand-welded steel tanks don't get abused and wrecked.
I'm not sure how well the philosophy works with people. Federal government work in many cases is seen as a tradeoff: lower compensation than equivalent skills would get you in the private sector, but with better job security to make up for it. If he significantly cuts headcount without cutting output (or if Congress follows up with more deliberate cuts) then maybe making that deal worse is still fine? We'll have fewer interested applicants, but we'll also have fewer jobs we need to fill, so we won't have to raise pay to compensate for the drop in supply? But this isn't like an engineering experiment where the experimenter is the only one who learns something and failure is just one of the things we can learn; here the experimentees are learning too and failure can have more lasting consequences.
The DC suburbs are the richest in the country. What part of that indicates lower compensation?
It seems more like, instead of lower compensation, it's simply lower standards, and the job security incentivizes the layabouts, the malingerers, and the otherwise unsuitable who could not command anywhere near the same remuneration anywhere else.
The DC suburbs are indeed very rich relative to a lot of the country, but it's not the federal employees who are holding up that average. The most a typical federal employee can make in DC is $191,900 as a GS15 Step 7-10 (note that $191,900 is a hard cap government wide and DC has one of the highest locality pay adjustments of any city in the country). That's a great salary by most standards, but bear in mind that GS15 positions are rare (most feds will retire never having reached a GS15 position) and you may gain one step a year after earning the position (OPM claims it takes on average 18 years to reach Step 10).
On top of that, as you say the DC suburbs are some of the richest in the country, and it's consequently incredibly expensive to live here. So while that $191,900 looks good, it's just getting into the range where you could comfortably buy a non-"fixer upper" house inside the Beltway without needing a contribution from your spouse's salary.
There are numerous industries in DC where you could make more with less experience like tech, law, defense contracting, lobbying, general federal contracting etc. Consider that those last three are all industries whose existence is predicated on their ability to suckle from the federal teat. If there's any villain in the story of modern government inefficiency I'd suggest we look at the contractors before we start vilifying the feds.
Federal pay scale for DC: https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries-wages/salary-tables/pdf/2024/DCB.pdf
Part of the deal is going back and forth from government to industry and then to government. It is why the private sector pay is pretty good.
A couple making 380k combined with strong benefits and time off…isn’t a bad living.
I’ve seen it in my space. Someone started private and then went public sector. Used that to get a major promotion which made him after five years attractive for a larger gov position. He then parlayed that into even a more lucrative financial position in the private sector.
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