The New Yorker:

The stereotype of the unmotivated official, which has fuelled Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s assault on government workers, has existed for as long as bureaucracy itself.

By Charlie Tyson

In December, the Republican senator Joni Ernst, of Iowa, released a report tauntingly titled “Out of Office: Bureaucrats on the beach and in bubble baths but not in office buildings.” Ernst, the chair of the Senate doge Caucus, had recently announced her intention to help Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency “cut Washington’s pork and make ’em squeal.” The report, with the alliterative plosives of its title raining down like flecks of spit, was an opening volley in the fight to rouse sleepy bureaucrats and put them on notice.

Ernst charged public employees with widespread absenteeism and dereliction of duty. The report’s headline finding—claiming that just six per cent of federal employees work full time in their offices—was quickly debunked. But the narrative of a lethargic civil service in bad need of work discipline was set in motion. “The parasites are thrashing hard,” Musk posted on X. Instead of government employees “pretending to work” and “being paid a lot for nothing,” Musk wrote, they would have to “get a real job.” The Fox News personality Jesse Watters summed up the story line by pronouncing, in December, that “bureaucrats have never been lazier.” According to Watters, “Biden spent forty per cent of his Presidency on vacation. But compared to the rest of the government he’s a workaholic.”

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