One former federal worker fired by Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is now tearing into the South African centibillionaire and the mass firings carried out by President Donald Trump's administration.
In a Wednesday op-ed for Fortune, U.S. Navy Reserves Lieutenant Commander Grace Jones argued that the laying off of thousands of government employees was both bad for the country and for the U.S. military. Jones, who worked for the Department of the Navy, said she was fired just six months into her career as a civilian employee after nine years as an active duty service member. She's also a graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School, with a Master's degree in public policy.
Jones wrote that she was fired not for any performance reasons, but for a limerick she sent in response to an email from the DOGE and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). That email, which was sent to millions of federal workers, asked recipients to justify their continued employment by writing five bullet points summing up the work they did the previous week. Jones decided that since she was responding on St. Patrick's Day, she would respond to the email in the form of a limerick (a five-line poem in which there are rhymes in the first, second and fifth lines and the third and fourth lines).
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The Navy veteran argued that the limerick was the fourth time she had to respond to the OPM's demand for five bullet points, and that she felt slighted by having to continuously defend her employment in a way she viewed as demeaning. In her op-ed, Jones asserted: "When leadership reduced our work to unclassified and meaningless bullet points, they got a response commensurate with the assignment." She said the limerick sent on March 17 was described as "poor conduct" in her termination letter. The limerick (which mentioned a Department of Defense system to "field thousands of autonomous systems" called Replicator) read:
"I coordinated across the field / Ensured that our plans were well-heeled / I synced with the teams / Pushed Replicator schemes / And pondered why bullets won't yield."
Jones explained her response by telling readers that "morale and esprit de corps are core to the success of our military," and that while veterans talk a lot about "sacrifice," they also place a lot of importance on "the stories, the pranks, and the laughter that made it bearable." She added that while she "wrote a rhyme for levity during these dark times," the limerick "was hardly conduct unbecoming of a defense official."
"I was fired because I dissented in the most minor of ways. It was dissent nonetheless. In these Orwellian times, the truth continues to be extinguished by tyranny," Jones wrote. "To federal employees: I see you. Do not live in fear. Semper Fortis ["Always Strong"]. To Musk and DOGE: History will not be kind. There’s still time to jump ship in favor of whatever honor remains. Non sibi sed patriae ["not for self, but for country."]
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Click here to read Jones' full op-ed in Fortune.