CNN’s Brian Stelter is at it again, this time scrambling to explain why asking federal employees to list their accomplishments for the week is somehow “nonsense.” The media correspondent took issue with Elon Musk’s latest initiative at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), where employees were required to submit a list of their work-related accomplishments by Monday night—or risk termination. To most Americans, this sounds like simple accountability. To Stelter, it’s a crisis.
Appearing on Inside Politics Monday, Stelter admitted that Musk’s approach sounds like common sense but quickly pivoted to call it “actually nonsense.” His reasoning? Bureaucracy.
He argued that while the question—“What did you do last week?”—is straightforward in the private sector, it becomes complicated in government, where some information is classified and some employees don’t check their email over the weekend.
That’s the excuse? That some federal workers can’t be bothered to check their email?
Musk didn’t hold back, exposing the deeper issue behind this initiative: there are people in the federal government collecting taxpayer-funded paychecks while doing little to no work. Even worse, Musk suggested that some of these “employees” might not exist at all—suggesting that outright fraud is at play.
“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. In other words, there is outright fraud,” Musk posted to X on Sunday.
And let’s not forget that this isn’t the first time Musk has pulled back the curtain on inefficiency. When he took over Twitter in 2022, he asked the same simple question to then-CEO Parag Agrawal before proceeding to clean house. Nearly 80% of Twitter’s 8,000 employees were later fired or left, yet somehow the company still runs—faster, cheaper, and without the endless layers of useless bureaucracy. If anything, that experience proved just how bloated and unnecessary many of these jobs were in the first place.
But this time, it’s not a failing tech company—it’s the federal government. And when you’re dealing with a workforce that has ballooned under previous administrations, the last thing career bureaucrats want is someone asking them to justify their positions.
Stelter and the media class know exactly why this is a problem, but their job is to spin it into something sinister. The idea that it’s too complicated to ask government employees what they actually do all day is an argument so weak it practically admits the problem outright. Americans are expected to prove their productivity at work every single day. Why should the government—funded by taxpayer dollars—be exempt from that same standard?
