DOGE You Want Me, Baby?: How Forcing Employees to List Accomplishments Can Laughably Backfire

Some management ideas sound super efficient until people actually have to follow them through. Take DOGE’s “5 Things” email policy. Every federal employee was told to send five bullet points every week summarizing their accomplishments. On paper, it looks like accountability. In practice, it became an administrative paperweight to be mocked and ridiculed. One more thing to place atop the “Elon looks like an idiot” pile.

The “5 Things” emails added pressure without adding value. People started worrying about how to package their work rather than how to do it. Some departments dropped the requirement entirely. Others stopped enforcing it. Most employees responded the only way anyone could when asked to submit weekly proof of their worth: by writing whatever they thought might look good enough to avoid scrutiny.

None of this improved performance. People began prioritizing tasks that were easy to summarize over work that actually moved the mission forward. Subtle contributions faded from view.

Cal Newport a professor of computer science at Georgetown and author of Deep Work, has argued that knowledge work does not lend itself to simple measurement. The most valuable tasks often require sustained attention, creative thinking, and a tolerance for ambiguity. These things rarely show up well in bullet points.

The email demanded visibility rather than value. So employees responded with whatever looked good enough to pass. Once they realized no one was reading the updates, the exercise turned theatrical. Some submitted responses in foreign languages. Others quietly stopped. Supervisors did not follow up. Agencies failed to track responses. The policy no longer functioned as a tool for oversight. It became a performance meant to signal control.

This issue has a long history. In the 1940s, Peter Drucker studied General Motors and noticed that while productivity on the factory floor was easy to track, office work was not. GM’s CEO at the time, Alfred Sloan, chose to manage based on objectives. He cared less about how people worked and more about whether they reached their goals. Drucker took this lesson and developed the idea of “management by objectives.”

Later, this thinking influenced Silicon Valley. Hewlett-Packard formalized the practice. Intel’s Andy Grove introduced a version called OKRs, or objectives and key results. Venture capitalist John Doerr helped spread the idea to companies like Google, where measurable goals became standard. But even this system has limits. It can be gamed. Employees can finish projects early by lowering the bar or labeling old work as new. What started as a structure for accountability becomes a stage for self-promotion.

The federal update emails repeated the pattern. There was no clear outcome, no feedback loop, no consequence for skipping it. The initiative unraveled within days. What remained was a thin simulation of management, propped up by inboxes full of unread bullet points.

The most dangerous part of a policy like this is what it does to judgment. It replaces managerial discretion with inbox compliance. It assumes the best way to manage work is to count it. The minute you treat output as a weekly checklist, you invite people to work for the checklist. You get answers without understanding, summaries without context, and activity without direction.

The logic behind “5 Things” might have started with good intent. But the execution revealed a deep mistrust of employees. Performance wasn’t measured by outcome, but by frequency of updates. If you didn’t write something down, you might as well not have done it. That approach is corrosive.

It doesn’t inspire better work. It inspires survival tactics. One IRS employee said skipping the DOGE emails gave them more time to actually do their job.

Musk’s threat (that failure to submit a weekly email would be treated as a resignation) turned out to be empty. Agencies walked it back within days. Some announced the emails were voluntary. Others ignored them entirely. Compliance collapsed. DOGE had overreached, and the workforce responded accordingly.

The bigger lesson is this: performative systems always collapse under their own weight. Especially when they rely on fear. Especially when they demand constant self-justification. If you can’t distinguish between value and visibility, you’ll never manage either.

A better system would focus on trust, clarity, and proper alignment between effort and impact. That requires judgment. It requires leadership. And it requires letting go of the idea that usefulness can be measured in bullet points.