Submit Your WAR!
Musk Demands Weekly Activity Reports from Federal Workers
Roughly four decades ago, as a young officer in the Air Force working on various projects, I had to submit what we jokingly called the WAR, or weekly activity report. I thought of that as I saw Elon Musk’s demand that federal workers submit personal reports of weekly accomplishments starting today; apparently, failure to do so will be seen as tantamount to resignation.
As usual, Musk is a heavy-handed jerk (which is putting it lightly, I know). Still, the idea of WARs isn’t a bad one. It helped me in my job as a project engineer in the Air Force. It served as a record of what I’d done, or tried to do, each week and it came in handy during performance reviews. Typically in the Air Force (and perhaps most other jobs as well), your boss who’s writing your performance review will ask you for input before she or he writes your equivalent to my OPR, or Officer Performance Report. To me, that was a simple exercise of gathering the old WARs and summarizing them in a page or two.
I hope Musk is also submitting his WAR. So far, he seems best at posing with chain saws or with one of his many kids in the Oval Office. If Musk doesn’t submit his WAR to me today, I’ll take it as his resignation from the DOGE.
