The ‘Office Space’ Question That Sent a Federal Bureaucrat into a Meltdown

“What would you say you do here?”

This is the seminal line of Mike Judge’s classic movie Office Space that has permeated American culture from its release. The line has become synonymous with the film itself but has now become the dreaded question that career federal employees do not want to hear – and will call for criminal investigation over.

Unfortunately, this Office Space sequel occurred at the highest levels of law enforcement. A recently released email by the Senate Judiciary Committee revealed that, instead of explaining what he does all day on his taxpayer funded salary, FBI agent Kevin Gounaud wanted to sue then-DOGE czar Elon Musk for even asking. Gounaud replied to an email from fellow FBI agent Steven Dunn to recommend “the opening of a criminal 58 matter on the person(s) at OPM who approved the transmission” of an earlier human relations email.

The HR email referenced was an ultimatum memo from Musk through the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to federal employees “requesting to understand what they got done last week” or resign. Musk sent a similar email to Twitter employees after buying the company in 2022.

Musk announced the memo’s circulation on X, formerly Twitter, before it was sent to federal employees across the government. Musk’s email asked for approximately five bullets “of what you accomplished last week,” with the employee’s manager copied on the reply.

Gounaud, ever the exemplar of the entrenched bureaucracy’s Napoleon complex, claimed that the person who circulated the HR email was “in conspiracy” with Musk and that, “in addition to wasting a colossal amount of official time, encouraged, abetted, aided, etc. thousands if not tens of thousands of government employees to violate government wide security policy and transmit sensitive government information outside of a strict need to know.”

The agent went on to claim that Musk “used a non government system (twitter) to relate information that allegedly was for official purposes,” and “likely generated income for himself based on Twitter’s monetization model and/or advertising revenues.” He further compared the release of a government memo to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s infamous private email servers. Gounaud went on to volunteer to report his demands for criminal proceedings to the OPM Office of Inspector General or Congress itself.

“And no, I’m not kidding,” he signed off in the email.

To lay it out plainly: instead of having federal employees account for what they have accomplished in their taxpayer-funded jobs, a practice commonly seen in the private sector, a career FBI official decided it would be more prudent to seek criminal legal action against the special government employee pushing for it.

This is absurd. And it embodies how the entrenched federal bureaucracy truly thinks. Our government is meant to be a steward of its constituents, not a drove of elitists who believe they know better than the people they serve. Kicking and screaming at the first sign of being asked what you’ve done in a week is not only unbecoming of anyone in federal service, it’s embarrassing to the institution the employee serves.

Outside of the fantasy world of the government bureaucracy, if your boss comes to you and asks what you’ve done in the last week, you answer. Especially if your boss is threatening to let you go if you fail to do so. Businesses do this to ensure that work is getting done and fat is trimmed. Just because you work for a three-letter agency or department doesn’t mean you get a free pass on general productivity.

Clearly, the question of “what would you say you do here” needs to be asked much more frequently of federal employees.