Argentinian President Javier Milei gave Elon Musk a chainsaw on Friday, and Musk wasted no time figuring out how to use it.

The trouble is that the chainsaw isn’t always the correct tool.

The latest Beltway buzz revolves around the infamous “What did you do last week?” email sent by the Department of Government Efficiency to two million or so federal employees. The email gave recipients 48 hours to reply with a list of “5 bullets of what you accomplished last week.” The first email was sent on Saturday, and the reply was expected by the end of the day on Monday.

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

As you can imagine, it went over like a lead balloon.

So, federal employees will be “given another chance,” Musk posted on X.

Subject to the discretion of the President, they will be given another chance.

Failure to respond a second time will result in termination. https://t.co/04xzgScXfj

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 25, 2025

The point is to ferret out the federal employees who are lazy bums and provide no return on taxpayer dollars. The folks who haven’t put on a pair of pants to go to the office since the pandemic. Or worse, the people who squander our money on loony left-wing ideological projects. It would be an enormous benefit to the nation, for example, to dump the yahoos who are busy “sexting” each other about their “transgender” fetishes on the taxpayers’ dime.

President Donald Trump endorsed the effort, saying it was “great because we have people that don’t show up to work, and nobody even knows if they work for the government.”

Tellingly, a handful of employees received the email and, rather than take a few minutes to thoughtfully reply, ran to the media to wail about the unfairness of it all. Others elected to respond with profanity-laced rudeness. Either of those options should be considered their resignation.

Unquestionably, far too many federal employees fit undesirable descriptions. Beginning with Woodrow Wilson, the executive branch has grown into an unwieldy behemoth, populated with unaccountable bureaucrats who run roughshod over the American people. They work for us at the pleasure of the president. It’s long past time to drain The Swamp of creatures who inflict so much damage on the constitutional order.

However.

Believe it or not, some federal employees are good people. They work hard, bring skill to their position, and are doing justifiable jobs in service to our country. They don’t have time for what feels like a silly game made for social media consumption instead of serious governance and genuine accountability. If you work at, say, a VA clinic and saw more than a full load of patients on Monday and then had to stay overtime to reply to an email, that probably didn’t strike you as the best use of time.

The irony is the ones with the time to reply are the ones who don’t do much.

Even if this email merely makes good employees anxious or annoyed, DOGE has not just removed “enemies” but made them. I don’t know which side of the ledge one particular Pentagon official lands on, but that person described it as “the silliest thing I’ve seen in 40 years and completely usurps the chain of command.”

There is also mass confusion, as some agencies, such as the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security, told employees not to answer. Even the Office of Personnel Management said a non-reply would not be punished with firing. (The ironic benefit there is it helps Musk prove in court that he is not wielding too much power over anyone.)

At a more strategic level, a critical distinction must be made. Constitutional conservatives favor limited government that functions within the bounds of constitutional Rule of Law. This feels more anti-government.

Then again, anti-government is what a huge portion of the American people have become these days. And who can blame them? We’ve just endured four years of Joe Biden’s fiat government, which infringed on everything from free speech to gun rights to the right to peaceably assemble or make your own medical decisions, all while Biden used bureaucratic channels to waste our tax dollars paying off the student loans of some nose-ringed loser who majored in 17th-century French lesbian poetry.

Few Americans who’ve lost jobs or endured the cruel consequences of administrative state actions have any sympathy whatsoever for a bureaucrat who’s a little miffed at having to respond to an email. Reporting to superiors is a regular part of doing business out here in the “real” world. Welcome to the club.

As political analyst Ben Domenech put it, “The idea that any group focused on efficiency can’t ask that question is a sign you just don’t care about whether the government wastes taxpayer money or not. You just want it to flow forever, an unending river of cash into the pockets of bureaucrats who ‘work’ from home with side hustles galore.”

Of all places, The Washington Post has a story this week that gets something right with its title: “Move fast, break things, rebuild: Elon Musk’s strategy for U.S. government.”

That does seem to be the Trump-Musk strategy. They know how badly broken Washington is, and they’re willing to break it a little or a lot more in order to fix it. Some good eggs will be broken to make this omelet, and that’s unfortunate for those eggs. It may even yield some unintended consequences that make good governance harder in some places. Yet even if this whole thing is arguably obnoxious and over the top, it’s hardly a constitutional crisis. Ideally, it will even restore constitutional order.

Follow Nate Jackson on X/Twitter.

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(Update: More than 20 DOGE staffers resigned Tuesday, citing their unwillingness to “dismantle critical public services.”)