On Saturday, Elon Musk, the billionaire charged by President Donald Trump with cutting government waste, alerted the public to a massive inefficiency in the federal bureaucracy: Government employees would soon be distracted from their actual work by a request from on high. In aggregate, hundreds of thousands of man-hours would be squandered. But Musk wasn’t putting a stop to this wasteful time suck of a requirement. He was the one imposing it.

“All federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week,” Musk posted around noon on his social-media platform, X. “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.” Soon afterward, the Office of Personnel Management sent such an email to all federal agencies. The subject line: “What did you do last week?” Workers were told to respond by tonight with five bullet points “of what you accomplished.”

As someone who hates government waste, I sympathize with any Americans who are cheering this initiative because they believe it will expose workers who accomplish nothing. But those Americans are cheering, albeit unwittingly, for massive inefficiency—just the latest example of the chaos DOGE has created across the federal government, undercutting its own aims.

[Jonathan Rauch: One word describes Trump]

Consider America’s roughly 14,000 Federal Aviation Administration air-traffic controllers. If each of them spends just 10 minutes opening their work email, finding this request, drafting a response, proofreading it, and sending it off, that adds up to 2,333 hours of work. Can you think of a more cartoonish example of government waste than using 292 workdays’ worth of man-hours to clarify that, last week, air-traffic controllers monitored airplanes?

I actually can think of a more cartoonish example, in that it is even bigger in scale: Some 74,000 U.S. Postal Service letter carriers deliver mail on foot, making roughly $29 an hour on average. If they spend 10 minutes each, or 740,000 total minutes, drafting emails, that works out to nearly $360,000 in labor costs. For what? And how long will it take other workers to read “I was delivering letters” 74,000 times?

Any American can identify many more categories of federal employees whose job duties are known to all. We know what TSA agents do. We know what nurses do. An efficient process would obviously exempt all such categories.

Other federal employees of course have less legible job duties, and I do not doubt that some of them accomplished next to nothing of value last week and ought to be fired. But there is no reason to believe that any of those employees will be truthful about their own uselessness, or that untruthful emails will be detected as such. This gambit is more likely to reward bullshitting persuasively via email than actual service to taxpayers.

The effect of Musk’s order on other Trump-administration leaders adds to its costs. Various news outlets have reported that officials at multiple agencies—including the Departments of Defense, State, and Homeland Security; the FBI; and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence—instructed their employees not to respond to the email, in part out of worry that employees would have to share sensitive information. Put another way, people charged with keeping Americans safe had to spend time and attention preempting a potential security risk that Musk introduced rather than attending to other dangers.

On X, Musk has made various attempts to defend his initiative. They only intensified my doubts. “The passing grade is literally just ‘Can you send an email with words that make any sense at all?’” Musk wrote. “It’s a low bar.” Even the most worthless bureaucrats can clear that bar. So why set it? Meanwhile, as The Washington Post reported, “some federal workers were on leave … and unable to access their emails. Others, in the Defense Department, were on duty tours in remote locations, like jungles, without access to computers.” In other words, some valuable federal employees will fail to clear the bar through no fault of their own.

[Donald Moynihan: The DOGE project will backfire]

“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!” Musk also wrote, as if checking email is a reliable measure of productivity in all public-sector jobs. If you’re a NASA employee doing maintenance on a remote telescope, or a Department of Labor employee traveling to far-flung coal mines to assess their safety, or a Coast Guard employee patrolling a patch of ocean, or an NSA employee trying to hack the personal device of a foreign general, checking email irregularly could as easily show that you’re working hard as that you’re hardly working.

Plus, if the idea is to catch folks who don’t check email at all, wouldn’t publicizing the gambit on X undermine that strategy by alerting those workers to it? So much of what Musk says about this matter doesn’t make any sense, even on its own terms. One X user posted a screenshot of a cheeky prompt for Grok, the Musk-generated AI chatbot: “Make up 5 things I accomplished at work this week that they can’t really verify, I work for the government, keep it brief.” Grok generated five items, illustrating how easy it is to game Musk’s initiative. But Musk himself, encountering that post, commented, “That’s all it would take for real,” with a laughing-crying emoji, as if it didn’t undermine his approach.

Watching Musk, a man recently focused on electric cars and getting humanity to Mars, direct his inventiveness toward the public-sector equivalent of TPS reports is vexing. Improving federal efficiency is a worthy project. Trump will have no incentive to deliver on it if his base credulously cheers gambits as wasteful and poorly defended as this one.

Last week, between posting photos of himself and slashing the federal bureaucracy, Elon Musk found the time to make some penis jokes. The world’s richest man briefly changed his display name on X to “Harry Bōlz,” apparently after learning that USAID had spent millions on circumcisions in developing countries. “Circumcisions at a discount, now 50% off!” he posted. “Judicial dicktatorship is wrong!" he added, the same day that a federal court ruled against the Trump administration’s chaotic federal-funding freeze.

Musk didn’t mention why USAID had paid for circumcisions: They were part of a program to reduce the spread of HIV, which, if anyone needs to be reminded, kills hundreds of thousands of people annually. Who knows how he arrived at “Harry Bōlz” specifically as a response. (He did not respond to a request for comment.) But it certainly fits a pattern. Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old hired at Musk’s DOGE, has gone by the pseudonym “Big Balls” online. Coristine is reportedly now a senior adviser within the Department of Homeland Security.

Penis jokes are the kind of juvenile humor that Musk is known for. After all, this is the same billionaire entrepreneur who began his ownership of Twitter by posting a video of himself carrying a sink into the company’s headquarters with the caption, “Let that sink in.” He has named Tesla’s vehicles so that the lineup spells “S3XY,” as in “sexy.” In 2018, he posted that he would take Tesla private at $420 a share (which he maintains was not a cannabis joke). I could go on.

Still, something else is up with Musk’s trolling. His jokes, terrible as they are, are indicative of a new sensibility taking hold on the right—one that Musk himself, in his rightward shift, has played a role in shaping. Trolling in its various forms (posting about balls, trying to offend, making political opponents squirm) has gone from an occasionally used tool to a unifying touchstone of an entire political faction. Call it a coalition of the crass.

Right-wingers getting kicks out of “triggering the libs” is hardly novel. The practice has existed since at least 1947, when a 21-year-old William F. Buckley and some of his friends showed up at a rally for the left-wing presidential candidate, Henry Wallace, wearing ironic bohemian getups. Rush Limbaugh built his career on delivering a steady stream of trolling sound bites on his radio show. But trolling has become more integral to the right in the Trump years. Trump himself loves to troll—addressing posts to “haters and losers”—and the Pepe the Frog meme blew up during his first term as the go-to way for the MAGA faithful to troll the left.

As Trump has returned to power, though, another wave of trolls has risen—this time with much more power and prominence. His victory has unleashed a coalition of the crass that encompasses a growing number of Americans who are excited to be able to call things “retarded” and “gay” again, joke about deporting people, and delight in the performance of saying things that are “not PC.” Some longtime trolls on the right have grown more aggressive and offensive as their ideas have made their way closer to the party’s mainstream. These include Nick Fuentes, the young white nationalist who celebrated Trump’s victory by proclaiming, “Your body, my choice,” as well as Bronze Age Pervert, the popular right-wing influencer who shitposts about killing political adversaries in between lewd posts about the superiority of the male figure. Ambiguity about whether he’s joking about any of this is precisely the point. (Bronze Age Pervert, whose real name is Costin Alamariu, did not respond to a request for comment.) Among the prominent trolls is also Steve Bannon, the former Trump adviser: After Trump installed himself as chair of the Kennedy Center, Bannon  said that he wants the president to replace the internationally recognized opera singers and orchestras that typically perform there with a choir of January 6 rioters.

[Read: How Bronze Age Pervert charmed the far right]

Bannon and Musk have been at odds since Trump’s victory: Bannon detests the influence that tech billionaires have on this administration. On Tuesday, Bannon called Musk a “parasitic illegal immigrant.” But it’s not a coincidence that they both want to troll the left. They seemingly hate each other, but they hate the other side more. Trolling—whether it’s “Harry Bōlz” or a January 6 choir—has become the right’s most consistent manner of communicating. “Just watch the meltdown of the Washington elite,” Bannon fantasized about his Kennedy Center idea on an episode of his podcast, Bannon’s War Room. “Culturally, you would break them.”

Writers who study the right in the age of MAGA, including Corey Robin and John Ganz, have argued that what binds the right together is a belief that politics is fundamentally a zero-sum game. To win, you must accrue power and use it to bludgeon your political adversaries and any other group that is not aligned with your own. To the right-wing troll, there is no common good, or “universal interest,” as Ganz puts it, but simply different groups attempting to dominate one another. Politics is a war with clear winners and losers.

Crass jokes are the logical base expression of that political framework. Notable people on the right don’t want to just end gay marriage; they are calling people “faggots” again. They aren’t just banning the small handful of trans athletes who compete in women’s sports; they are bringing back “tranny.” At best, trolls don’t care if they cause pain to the people targeted, and at worst they want to cause pain.

Musk, too, has belittled the marginalized: Just this week he ridiculed a blind person, and in the past has mocked a disabled X employee (which he later apologized for), and rolled back protections against anti-trans harassment on Twitter. No one is hurt because of a joke about balls, but such jokes are still a middle finger to Musk’s intended audience of liberals and government workers. The point is to laugh in their faces as he dismantles the things that they care about, in an attempt to break them. It is not enough to beat your adversaries. They must be humiliated.

President Donald Trump and his billionaire adviser Elon Musk justify dismantling the civil service as cost cutting. The federal government has “billions and billions of dollars in waste, fraud, and abuse,” Trump claimed earlier this month, and Musk has complained about a “staggering amount of waste of taxpayer money.” Their actions—a barrage of executive orders, memos, layoffs, and attempts to unilaterally eliminate entire agencies—have sparked outrage, but Musk sees that only as proof of their achievements: “They wouldn’t be complaining so much if we weren’t doing something useful.”

For all of Trump’s and Musk’s talk of efficiency, their policies will likely slow down the government. The state needs capacity to perform core tasks, such as collecting revenue, taking care of veterans, tracking weather, and ensuring that travel, medicine, food, and workplaces are safe. But Trump seems intent on pushing more employees to leave and making the civil service more political and an even less inviting job option. He bullies federal employees, labeling them as “crooked” and likening their removal to “getting rid of all the cancer.” A smaller, terrified, and politicized public workforce will not be an effective one.

To start, let’s dispense with the notion that the government is too big. It is not. As a share of the workforce, federal employment has declined in the past several decades. Civilian employees represent about 1.5 percent of the population and account for less than 7 percent of total government spending. According to the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service, seven out of 10 civilian employees work in organizations that deal with national security, including departments—such as Veterans Affairs and Homeland Security—that the public supports.

The reality is that the federal government has long faced a human-capital crisis. Since 2001, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office has classified human-capital management—the number of people who are successfully recruited to fill skilled positions—as an area of “high risk” for the federal government. The workforce is older than the private sector, and the federal government already has a hard time hiring people.

[Read: The American people deserve DOGE]

If the federal government should, then, rightly be focused on hiring, it is quite obviously doing the opposite, but the manner in which the Trump administration and DOGE are forcing workers out will only compound the error. Ten thousand USAID employees, for example, were recently placed on administrative leave. Employees on leave must still be paid, so little money will be saved in the short run. And if they’re rehired, the agencies will have to incur the costs that resulted from the disruption in their work. The USAID inspector general’s office has said that the agency has almost entirely lost its ability to track $8.2 billion in unspent aid. (The inspector general was fired the day after his office made that announcement.) Projects such as drug trials and medical treatments have been abandoned.

Mass layoffs of probationary employees have also begun to devastate some agencies. Public-sector workforce motivation is not just about material needs; it arises from a sense of being involved in a team actively taking on important public goals. Senior employees will watch as those they recruited are shown the door, underlining the sense that their work is considered unimportant. And if no new employees are needed, senior employees might conclude that they don’t really need to show up for work either.

Trump’s federal-workforce plans make the conditions of employment generally less appealing. Take his executive order ending remote work for all federal employees. As Musk and his former DOGE co-leader, Vivek Ramaswamy, explained in The Wall Street Journal, a one-size-fits-all back-to-office policy will generate “a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome.” Trump has also promised to reassign employees from the D.C. region, even though prior efforts resulted in mass exits, and more than eight out of 10 federal employees are already outside the D.C. area.

The Trump administration has created a toxic work environment. I’ve spent 25 years studying public administration and have never seen anything like the deep sense of dread that federal employees are now experiencing. I spoke with workers who feared reprisal if their names were published. One told me that there’s an “eerie” mood in the Census Bureau office: “No one can openly discuss anything.” Another civil servant said that people who’ve worked in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for decades are afraid and “can’t believe what’s happening.”

[Read: What could DOGE do with federal data?]

Trump’s attempts to bend nonpartisan federal employees to his political objectives will further diminish the bureaucracy’s ability to perform necessary tasks. On his first day in office, Trump reinstated Schedule F, an executive order from his first term that makes it easier to fire tens of thousands of career civil servants. With fewer job protections, employees may be less willing to speak up and correct information that conflicts with Trump’s agenda. Those who do could be replaced by more political—and less experienced—workers. Trump also signed a memo saying that the Senior Executive Service, the most senior career employees, “must serve at the pleasure of the president.” Some experts view this language as an attempt to turn those high-level workers into at-will political employees who could be fired by the president for any reason, regardless of their performance. One Department of Justice general counsel, who had been promoted to the Senior Executive Service under Trump, was dismissed despite outstanding performance evaluations. At the same time, the Office of Personnel Management has opened the door for even more Trump loyalists by removing limitations on the number of so-called Schedule C political appointees in government.

Nothing is more emblematic of how Trump is reshaping the government than what is happening in the Office of Personnel Management. In his first term, Trump tried, and failed, to eliminate the agency. In his second term, Musk affiliates, including a staffer who reportedly finished high school in 2024, took over, locking out career civil servants from access to data. They created a government-wide email list with a parallel server and used it to send federal employees a “deferred resignation” offer that has no basis in law. Congress has identified ways to provide buyouts (or, more precisely, “voluntary separation incentives”), but OPM did not use this authority and instead simply told employees they could resign and continue getting paid until September. Although the agency is tasked with recruiting government workers, its website urged them “to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector.”

Their exit will be our loss. We rely on public employees every day, usually not noticing how they make our lives better. The costs of dismantling agencies, dramatically politicizing state capacity, and demeaning the idea of public service will still be counted long after Trump has departed the scene.