Shannon Bond
speaker
521 appearances
63 recordings
5 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 15 Sep
Shannon Bond’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 53 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 12.
Appearances
You know, many of the employees that I spoke with said this is not about They don't want to go back into the office, that it's inconvenient or that they're being lazy. They say that for them, remote work has enabled them to be more efficient, to be more productive. And then getting rid of it feels like an indirect way of pressuring them to quit.
And they say it just doesn't make a lot of sense bringing people back into offices that can't accommodate them. It's actually going to cost the government money.
It is.
And it didn't end up that simple. So Musk posted about this on X on Saturday, said everyone's going to receive this email. And by the way, if you don't respond, we're going to take that as a resignation, which is sort of kind of a stunning thing to announce, like by this person who He is a special government employee, but the White House has said he's not running anything, right?
He's not running any of these agencies. He's not running the Office of Personnel Management. He's not even running the Doge office that he has sort of established in the White House. Technically, we'll get into that. But then this government-wide email comes out from the Office of Personnel Management asking people to respond to this. Well, no, it did not have the ultimatum about not responding.
And immediately we just saw like utter confusion and chaos across federal agencies. You know, workers are being like, am I supposed to respond to this? Like some of them are like, I work on classified material or, you know, and it said don't put any classified information in. But like a lot of people were quite nervous about like what is going to be done with this? How do I respond?
Agencies start in some cases saying, yes, this is fine. Go ahead and respond. Other agencies, including the State Department, the Defense Department, Homeland Security are like, absolutely not. Do not send this in. And, you know, that is some of the first sort of real backlash we've gotten against Musk by, you know, people in the cabinet, right?
Cabinet level secretaries saying, hold on, you know, we run these agencies. This is our workforce. We get to control and manage what they're doing. And you can't just sort of order people to do this. But it does raise all these questions. I mean, many of the workers I were talking to were saying, like, who's in charge here? Like, is it the agency? And then in some cases is telling me,
First to respond, then telling me not to respond, you know, with supervisors or giving people conflicting information. You have Musk continuing to say on X, if people don't respond, they're going to be fired. You have OPM first coming out and saying, actually, this is voluntary, then putting out another memo being like, well, it's up to the agencies to decide if it's voluntary or not.
Like, just again, like people are just like, who is in charge? Who is making the decisions here? And I think we're going to see, like, to what degree do some of these political appointees who have been Senate confirmed, right, to their positions? you know, how are they going to continue to assert their power over Musk?
So like an example here is like the Department of Energy, right? Which as we reported on, you know, when these sort of initial probationary layoffs or firings happened, you know, cut a bunch of workers at the National Nuclear Security Administration. You know, these are people who work with nuclear warheads and then had to rehire them, right?
Because actually they were like, oh no, we can't actually fire these people. Like we need these people. They're very much in the position now, right? I think there's a bit of like
You know, the actual functionality of these agencies, they do have work to do and they need to make sure that if they are going to trim down, they trim, you know, not trimming people who actually need to be doing some of this work. And I guess I think some of this is about like ego and sort of turf battles over like who ultimately is the decider here.
Like, you know, these are all people, many of them, you know, themselves have business backgrounds, right? They're coming in saying like, I want to be in charge here. And like, you know, I'm not going to just like let Elon Musk tell me what to do.
But it's been quite interesting because I think a lot of people were sort of speculating, you know, is it Musk and Trump who are going to have a fallout? Like what's going to happen here? And actually, I think some of the first battles we're seeing is between Musk and these cabinet secretaries. OK, we got to take a quick break, but we'll be right back.
Yeah, that's right. I mean, some of this is like literally the exact playbook, right? And we knew that with the fork in the road email, right, offering for government workers to resign. He sent an email with the same subject line to Twitter employees, again, asking them to resign after he bought that company.
Similarly, this idea of like reporting in five things you accomplished last week, you know, that is something he has implemented at his companies. Even the title of that email, what did you do last week? That is something that he had famously texted to the then CEO of Twitter, like when he was basically making the decision to buy the company and try to kick out current management.
And we're seeing again and again, he's bringing this playbook in from his businesses that, you know, I think to his mind has been successful in the past, right? Yeah. And I think what that tells us very much is – and we've talked about this before, right? He – Musk sees the government, you know, as not really any different from a corporation. He's talked about this.
He's called it America Incorporated. And it needs to have a corporate restructuring. And he's very much going about it the way he would, you know, if you were the, you know, pretty independently powerful CEO of a large company where you can say, yeah, I'm going to fire wide swaths of people.
I mean, this is also played out in the same way at Twitter, where Twitter fired people and then had to rehire them, right? Because they actually found out some of them were doing jobs that the company needed. But part of the reason we're seeing kind of so much like confusion and disruption and pushback is that like the problem is fundamentally the government is not a corporation.
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