The most offensive four-letter word in the English language right now is “work.”

At least if you’re an employee of the federal government.

In the public sector, every hack has always understood the unspoken distinction between a “job,” which everyone has, as opposed to actual “work,” that most dreary task that has always fallen to a vanishingly small number of, er, workers.

And of course the employees who actually have to show up and get something tangible done are almost always paid much less money than the Ivy League swells with the fancy titles and the big corner offices that are, and always have been, empty on most Mondays and Fridays.

But until 2020, even the deputy senior interim associate commissioners had to come into the office sometimes. Thus the old joke:

Q. Why don’t public workers look out the window in the morning?

A. Because they want to have something to do in the afternoon.

Hacks had to show up occasionally, at least on Thursdays or Fridays, to pick up their paychecks. But then came direct deposit. The already fragile ties between so-called workers and the “workplace” frayed even more.

The hacks’ final slender link to the office was severed during the phony-baloney COVID Panic of 2020. The non-working classes stopped even pretending to show up for work. In fact, they congratulated themselves on their patriotism in not coming in, ever again.

They were doing it for the children. To slow the spread. For 14 days. And then for the next 1,825 days. Better safe than sorry. If it saves just one life….

Five years after the end of the Red Chinese virus, even the vaguest concepts of “work” have withered away in vast tracts of the federal hackerama.

In some agencies, on-site workers aren’t just an endangered species, they have in fact become extinct. When was the last time you had a human being answer a phone call in a government office?

Many federal workers don’t work anymore. Office buildings are empty, deserted. Yet the employees continue to slurp at the trough, often in verdant exurban resorts far from where they were once nominally assigned to, again you’ll pardon the four-letter word, work.

This is the way Joe Biden wanted it. He never worked a day in his worthless life, so of course he identified with the federal workforce.

Waste fraud and abuse uber alles! That’s the Democrats’ hill to die on.

Last November 92% of the District of Columbia voted for Kamala. The 8% that are cops and Uber drivers went for Trump, hoping that he would do exactly what he has now instructed Elon Musk to do.

Namely, make it hot for all the hacks.

And so the emails from Elon Musk went out, asking the hacks to list five things they’d accomplished in their jobs last week.

The reaction was instantaneous.

One union boss called Musk’s demands “cruel and disrespectful.” Another said it was “completely un-American” to ask federal employees what they’re doing, or if in fact they even exist.

A woman from the NLRB went on CNN to talk about having her privacy invaded on a Saturday afternoon – “I felt absolutely infuriated.”

As Scott Jennings pointed out after the tape was played:

“She had time to go on CNN, but she didn’t have time to send a 30-second email saying, here’s what I was working on last week?”

There’s a guy who calls my radio show from Newark NJ. He calls himself “Mr. Garcia.” He works at a federal government property. For the last five years, he’s basically been a watchman in what amounts to an abandoned building, which is why he has time to listen to my show and call every few days.

Now, Mr. Garcia is seeing people drift in who’ve been AWOL since 2020.

“One woman, she used to be so beautiful,” he told me last week. “She just came back. I couldn’t believe it – she must have put on 100 pounds.”

You could see the same phenomenon when the SJC started doing Zoom hearings in 2021-22 after a year or two on vacation. They used to tell us in local TV news that the camera put 10 pounds on everyone.

It put 30-40 pounds on every one of those judges, none of whom were exactly prime physical specimens to begin with.

Everybody at Mr. Garcia’s building was supposed to finally report back to the office Monday. That afternoon I asked him what he’d noticed in the returning federal “work” force.

“They all told me the same thing,” he said. “They said they get so much more work done when they’re at home. Every one of them said that.”

So then it should have been a pleasure to return to the office. Now that they’re back at work they can start goofing off again. Just don’t look out the window in the morning because….

Another federal worker this weekend told a friend of mine about checking out the parking lot outside her government building. It’s been tumbleweeds there for five years.

Suddenly, in the last week or so, the Priuses and the hybrids are back (but not Teslas, because this atrocity is all the fault of Mr. You-Know-Who).

The funny thing, the employee said, is how many of the cars now have out-of-state plates. Because, of course, thousands of federal employees wisely used their five-year paid vacations to flee to safer, lower-tax, i.e., red states. While of course they continued to collect at the higher federal urban pay-rates because they still claim that they “work” in higher cost-of-living cities.

For the non-working Democrat apparatchiks in the public sector, who were so arrogant that they awarded themselves “bonuses” for bravely soldiering through the alleged crisis of COVID, this is a disaster.

For the rest of us, who’ve still had to keep going to work and putting in eight-plus hours every damn day, Elon’s emails represent long overdue payback.

On Monday, I got a call from a guy in a truck. He said he and his fellow tradesmen are all relishing the anguish of the chattering classes.

“We have a joke, if only somebody could invent a Bluetooth hammer, maybe we could work from home too, just like all these rich bastards who’ve been sitting home all day for all these years.”

WINNING!