There’s an old line from one of Ronald Reagan’s press conferences that you’ve probably heard before. He’s talking about trade embargoes and inflation and how farmers in Illinois are being impacted by government policy.

He begins with one of his trademark quotes, by saying:

The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.

The line obviously resonated, and not just with the farmers who were watching that press conference in Chicago — anyone who’s ever interacted with the government understood immediately what Reagan was getting at. Most of the time, when the government gets more involved in your life for whatever reason, it’s a good indicator that your life is about to get worse. And normal people are scared of that possibility, for good reason.

At the same time, Reagan’s one-liner raised a question that, until now, has gone unanswered. And that question is this: If everyday people are mortally terrified of government intervention in their lives, then what exactly do government bureaucrats fear, above all else? What short, unassuming sentence could possibly terrorize the entire federal workforce, in the same way that the government is capable of terrorizing everyday citizens?

A couple of days ago, courtesy of Elon Musk and DOGE, we learned the answer to those questions. We finally learned how to usher in a state of total panic in the federal government, in just a few short words. It turns out that all you need to do, if you want federal bureaucrats to melt down in a very public and humiliating fashion, is ask them what they did last week. That’s it. To bring the entire federal bureaucracy to its knees, you just need to pose a question that every single private-sector worker on the planet is able to answer, and knows they must be able to answer, or they will be fired.

As you may have seen by now, here’s the email I’m talking about. It was sent by the Office of Personnel Management, which is essentially the HR department of the federal government. And it was clearly drafted by Elon Musk, who famously asked the same question to the old CEO of Twitter (before Musk took over the company and fired him). Here’s what it looked like:

As you can see, it reads, “Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager.” You will not find a less threatening, more straightforward question that an employer could possibly ask an employee. I struggle to think of any remotely productive worker, in any context, who would have any difficulty answering this question. A janitor could say he mopped five floors. A plumber could say he fixed five toilets. A restaurant worker could say he served a certain number of tables, or cleaned a certain number of dishes. A lawyer or consultant or anyone else with an hourly rate could produce a timesheet that outlines everything he did, at every single moment of the day. Okay, well a consultant may not be able to do that but most workers in the private sector — both white collar and blue collar — can and often must.

WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show

But for many federal government workers, this email is an existential threat. That’s because, unlike the overwhelming majority of workers in this country, they — in many, though not all cases — don’t do anything, and to this point have not been expected to do anything. They shuffle papers around and wait until their pensions vest. This is something that’s considered impolite to say out loud, but everyone knows it’s true. In many cases, these federal jobs function like a kind of welfare that’s designed specifically to provide fake jobs to certain demographics. And that’s not some Right-wing conspiracy theory, by the way. Spend five minutes reading Left-wing media, and you’ll find that this statement isn’t even controversial.

For example, here’s a report this week from “NBC BLK”, which is NBC News’ division that produces reports for black people. That’s something that exists, for some reason.

In other words, yes, these federal jobs don’t really benefit the taxpayers who are funding the salaries. Instead, they benefit certain demographics that, without these fake jobs, would not make anywhere near as much money. In their panic over Elon Musk, Democrats and the corporate press are finally admitting that.

As you’d expect, they’re going to fight like hell to keep that gravy train going. Some federal workers have just filed a lawsuit against the government because of the email asking them what they do all day. Yes, rather than answer an extremely basic question that demands a bare minimum of accountability, federal workers have already gone to court.

As Axios reports:

Federal workers sue over ‘what did you do last week’ email.” … Only federal agencies have the ability to hire and fire their workers, the lawsuit says. The Office of Personnel Management, the federal government’s HR office, which sent out the email over the weekend, does not have that authority, the suit alleges.

They’re specifically objecting to Elon Musk’s statement that, if workers don’t answer the email, it’ll be taken as a resignation. They’re arguing, in essence, that federal workers are entitled to ignore emails from their bosses asking them what they do all day. That is the extent of entitlement we’re dealing with here. And by the way, these workers are getting a second chance to answer the email.

Now Musk has clarified that:

Subject to the discretion of the President, they will be given another chance. Failure to respond a second time will result in termination.

So they get another chance. And it looks like, if they want to keep their jobs, these workers should take it. Already, several federal departments have told their employees that they need to reply to this email. The Department of Transportation has instructed workers to reply, for example. So has the Department of Health and Human Services, the Social Security Administration, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and many others.

But there are signs that throughout the federal government, many workers will simply be incapable of answering the email. They legitimately cannot think of a single thing they did in the past week, apparently. And that’s probably terrible news for their careers. But it’s good news for us, because if nothing else, their televised meltdowns have been pretty entertaining. We’ll start with this indignant woman on CNN, who works at some unnamed federal agency. Watch:

Evidently this woman has a lot of time to appear on CNN and claim she’s being “bullied” and “harassed,” and says she’s “absolutely infuriated.” But even after talking through this whole segment, she still never explains what she does all day. Instead she attacks her supervisors.

And of course she’s just one of many examples. On Reddit, federal workers are posting various plans for non-compliance and retaliation. They’re talking about ways to spam the federal email system, for example. One viral post — which was picked up by CNN — reports that some federal workers may be considering leaking top-secret information to foreign adversaries. That’s how committed these people are to “public service.” They’re willing to commit treason when they lose their easy paychecks.

What’s especially funny about this whole meltdown is that, a few years ago, documents obtained by the investigative reporter Patrick Hauf found that 25% of federal workers “went a full month without even attempting to check their emails” during the COVID lockdowns. They just went dark. So really, you can make the case — as Musk has — that these emails are necessary just to make sure these workers are still alive, and still opening their laptops every now and then. But apparently that’s too much for these workers to deal with. They’re worried that, if they have to answer the email honestly, they might lose their jobs.

Thousands of “probationary” federal workers have already met that fate. In particular, terminated workers at the IRS are having some of the better meltdowns.

Here’s one of them, which was posted by NBC Philadelphia:

Yes, this IRS worker stated that he was shocked to be fired because he actually showed up to work five days a week. That was his “tour of duty,” as he put it. These are people who legitimately think they’re storming the beaches of Normandy just by going into an office building on a regular schedule. They cannot imagine a scenario in which normal people don’t see them as war heroes because they leave home, commute to their job, occasionally conduct audits that make people’s lives a living hell, and then get to punch out at 3:30 in the afternoon. They have a schedule about as grueling as a third grader.

This seems to be something of a trend at the IRS. Here’s another recently terminated IRS worker:

Did you catch his “dream job”? He was a “tax-exempt officer dealing with nonprofit organizations and compliance.” That’s what he’s crying about on national television. Growing up, some people want to be astronauts, or race-car drivers. But not this guy. He dreamt of becoming a “tax-exempt officer dealing with nonprofit organizations and compliance.” That’s how he thought he’d “serve” the American people, as he sits there in sweatpants with his smoke detector beeping, which is so on the nose that I thought this video was a joke when I first saw it on X. But it isn’t. And then of course there’s the part where he explains that, in his understanding, the federal government “took care of its people,” unlike corporate America. In other words, he thought he’d scored a permanent job with no accountability whatsoever.

None of these people can hear themselves speaking. None of them understand what they’re acknowledging. In reality, they are making the case for their terminations better than Elon or Donald Trump possibly could. They’re all more or less stating that they don’t do anything.

But to be fair to the federal government, there are some exceptions. There are some employees — particularly employees in the federal intelligence agencies — who have been very busy in recent years. I’m talking specifically about the National Security Agency, or NSA. And we know they’ve been busy at the NSA because the City Journal just obtained chat logs from the agency’s top-secret internal messaging system.

As the City Journal has just reported:

These logs, dating back two years, are lurid, featuring wide-ranging discussions of sex, kink, polyamory, and castration. One popular chat topic was male-to-female transgender surgery, which involves surgically removing the penis and turning it into an artificial vagina. ‘[M]ine is everything,’ said one male who claimed to have had gender reconstruction surgery. … Another intelligence official boasted that genital surgery allowed him ‘to wear leggings or bikinis without having to wear a gaff under it. These employees discussed hair removal, estrogen injections, and the experience of sexual pleasure post-castration.’

It goes on from there.

So at least we know what the NSA has been up to. And if we’re being honest, we all know that this kind of thing was going on at many other federal agencies. If it was happening at the NSA — supposedly one of the more serious federal agencies — then it was happening all over. None of these federal workers ever thought they’d be held accountable for what they do all day. That’s because, for more than a century, thanks in part to various Supreme Court decisions, the idea of an ever-expanding, vast federal bureaucracy has been taken as a “given” in this country. No one thought it could ever be reined in. The federal government assumed more and more powers and “civil service protections” and so on.

But the Constitution doesn’t require any of this. Instead, the Constitution empowers the Executive to run the executive branch, which employs every single one of these perverts, narcissists, and incompetents. No judge, no lawsuit, no act of Congress, and certainly no CNN appearance can circumvent the Constitutional separation of powers that gives the executive branch that control. What we’re seeing now — which is something we should’ve seen a long time ago — is an executive branch that’s finally willing to exercise that control.