Elon Musk wants all government employees to send emails summarizing their work weeks to their managers and the Office of Personnel Management. How much time would it take to read them all, and how much would that cost? We did the math.
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For a second straight week, federal employees were asked to send an email with bullet points explaining what they did all week to the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and their supervisors. Since this is done at the behest of Elon Musk, aka Mr. Government Efficiency, we decided to crunch the numbers a bit to see what this little stunt costs.
First of all, there are about 2.25 million federal employees (not counting the 2.25 million who serve in the active-duty military and reservists). The email from OPM notes that government employees who only work on classified or sensitive issues can opt out of responding by replying “All of my activities are sensitive.”
The number of civil servants who only do classified work (and don’t, for example, participate in meetings, send emails, or make coffee) can’t be all that great. However, to be charitable, let’s assume that one-third of all government employees are exclusively doing sensitive work.
That leaves a non-military workforce of 1.5 million.
So we asked ourselves: Who is going to read and process all of these emails, and how long would that take?
Let’s do the math.
Obviously, if the entire point of this exercise is to harass federal employees, it takes approximately zero hours, because, in that case, all of the emails can just be ignored.
But, surely, a guy who wants to destroy the government would never do that, right?
So let’s pretend that this is a good-faith effort to increase the efficiency of the government, in which case, somebody has to sift through 1.5 million emails.
That begs the question how many of these emails a human being can process (even though there probably is a role for AI in this process).
Just to open an email and read it might take a minute or even less. However, that’s only the first step in a process in which the content of the email has to then be evaluated and assigned to each government employee’s file (again, we are assuming that this isn’t just an extremely idiotic stunt).
Even with the help of AI, that will take a few more minutes.
In addition, let’s not forget that the address to which the emails are sent is public knowledge, and nefarious pranksters have been spamming it. In other words, they have been writing to hr@opm.gov even though they are not government employees, and all those responses — for example, of people pretending to be Musk or Donald Trump — have to be sifted out.
Charitably, let’s assume it would take a total of five minutes to read a legitimate email, process, and file it.
That means one person can go through 12 emails per hour, 96 per day, and 480 in a standard work week.
Based on those numbers, it would take more than 3,000 people to process these emails if they did nothing else all day (and let’s not forget that this will be duplicative work since the supervisors of each government employee will receive the same emails).
Here is the thing: OPM only has 2,877 FTEs, which is government-speak for full-time equivalent employees.
Therefore, it would have to hire a few hundred additional email readers to get the job done. And, based on the average salary of government employees, this email stunt would cost a mere $330 million and change.
But who’s counting?
Certainly not Elon Musk, the “brains” behind the DOGE operation.
In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.
