Late on Friday evening, federal employees began receiving the latest directive from the Office of Personnel Management to justify their continued employment. The email, subject-lined “What did you do last week? Part II” and viewed by Splinter, once again directed employees to respond with “approx. 5 bullets” of what they accomplished the previous week and went on to say that this should now be considered a weekly assignment, due each Monday at 11:59 pm ET. That’s twice now that Musk and his minions have specifically decided to make federal employees miserable over the weekend.
At 6:50 ET on Monday morning, employees at the Department of Health and Human Services received guidance on the OPM directive, much as they eventually did last week. It once again told them to reply in general terms without too much identifying information, and finished by telling employees to “Assume that what you write will be read by malign foreign actors and tailor your response accordingly.”
So far, so similar — but then, an abrupt change, one hour and 14 minutes later. Another message went out to HHS staff at 8:04 AM ET with essentially the exact same guidance, only no such warning about spies in our midst. Curious!
It isn’t clear exactly where that little edit originated from, but there are a few vaguely Musk-, Vought-, or DOGE-shaped guesses that would make a lot of sense. And while the first edition of the five-bullets demand was eventually amended to be considered “voluntary,” now it seems to be required — with real teeth. One source at the National Institutes of Health told Splinter that leadership thinks the responses will be used for RIFs, or reductions in force, as outlined absurdly last week by OPM and Russell Vought’s Office of Management and Budget. Some employees were told in a staff meeting on Monday that leadership does not believe the supposed exception for employees who are out on leave, and that they should send their weekly updates no matter what as an attempt to avoid the axe.
Meanwhile, actual agency functions continue to be hamstrung by this and every other move emanating from the top. A source at the National Cancer Institute told Splinter that travel has once again been frozen for all of March, even after a scramble to get various travel approved over the last couple of weeks. The instructions from leadership included a note that travel will be revisited on a weekly basis, which as the source said is very much “not compatible with attending scientific meetings.”
Another source said that HHS may have sent their five-bullets guidance to both federal employees and federal contractors, “presumably by mistake,” so now there are non-government companies and employees out there wondering if their work or contracts will get killed if they don’t also respond to OPM. “But no one knows for sure,” the source said.
That uncertainty, and the weekends of fear and worry, and the stalled science and regulatory function — they all remain the point of all this. A broken government, wasting time and resources every day, at the whims of malign domestic actors.
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