On Monday, some federal employees began getting a bounce-back message upon attempting to satisfy the now weekly “5 bullets” requirement. “The recipient’s mailbox is full and can’t accept messages now,” read the message returned from the [email protected] address, per reporting initially from Marisa Kabas. Already an exercise in anti-efficiency, forcing workers to spend time justifying their existence in emails that, at best, will be read by some janky AI system and scoured for words on the no-no list and used to include people in the coming reductions in force, now even that function is breaking down.
According to a source at the National Institutes of Health, staff there received instructions that if their 5 bullets messages bounce back to send instead to an “hr10” version of the same email address. Only, NIH employees had already been instructed to use the “hr7” version; that inbox, at least so far, is still accepting messages. Literally every second spent on this is wasted time.
In much more impactful news, Elon Musk’s targeting of the Social Security Administration is starting to bear fruit. The Washington Post reported on an agency “engulfed in crisis,” with crashing websites, no one to answer the phones, and a supposed DOGE crusade to find nonexistent fraud. The SSA, which delivers retirement and survivor benefits to 73 million people, is currently run by a guy who got the acting administrator job because he went against his bosses and out of his way to help DOGE bust in; he admits, though, that the Musk minions are actually running the badly faltering show.
Other agencies are going to start falling apart soon too. A source at the Forest Service, part of the Department of Agriculture, told Splinter that the rumored RIF on its way may consolidate the nine FS regions down into only three, severely hampering its functions ranging from research to firefighting. Five of the nine “regional foresters,” senior employees who oversee each region, are retiring, and something like 30 percent of the FS is likely to be fired. Similar stories — potentially cutting NIH institutes and centers from 27 down to 15, eliminating wide swaths of the EPA, and so on — can be found across the government.
And then of course there was yesterday’s bombshell, where half of Trump’s cabinet planned a war on a messaging app and included the Atlantic’s editor in chief. The strikes against Houthis in Yemen “succeeded,” in the sense that they went ahead as discussed by Pete Hegseth and others, but only after committing one of the absolute stupidest national security breaches in American history.
The lines separating what is intentional and what is collateral damage become blurred largely beyond recognition — and in the end it doesn’t really matter.
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