At 4:48 pm ET on Saturday, a message from the Office of Personnel Management started going out to literally every corner of the executive branch (and beyond — we’ll get to that). Approximately two minutes after that, sources from various of those corners began sending images of the email to me, and to every other journalist they are now routinely in contact with.
With the subject line “What did you do last week?” the email demanded that every recipient “reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager.” It then reassuringly instructed employees, “do not send [emphasis Musk’s, I mean OPM’s, or whatever] any classified information, links, or attachments” and finished with a deadline of “this Monday at 11:59pmEST” which was for some very phishy reason hyperlinked.
This absolute inanity followed a post from Musk himself that warned of its arrival, though he said a failure to respond would be considered a resignation. The obvious illegality of that tidbit not making it into the email is evidence of, well, some sort of whisper-down-the-lane firewall, I suppose, though not a particularly reassuring one.
The response from federal employees has been relatively united: this is absurd and we’re not doing it. I heard from multiple people that they aren’t even opening the email because it seems so shady, and best phishing-avoidance practices would have it relegated to a spam folder and reported to IT, if not just forgotten entirely. One source pointed out that even the warning against classified information helps capitalize the U in Unqualified here, as many government employees routinely deal with “controlled unclassified information,” which is exactly what it sounds like — things that are not technically classified but still are not permitted to be sent randomly around to hastily constructed OPM email addresses.
Once one starts to actually ponder the mechanics of this exercise it gets even dumber. What part of “efficiency” involves actual government employees reading through hundreds of thousands of bullet-pointed messages explaining what everyone from a wildland firefighter to a VA nurse did last week? The answer, of course, is that even if anyone obeyed this “order,” no one was going to read them — the plan was probably to feed them into Grok or some other system and let it somehow flag the undesirables, or compare it against master email lists to see who didn’t respond, and attempt to fire or otherwise harass that way.
I and others also heard from multiple sources that the email managed to extend blob-like beyond the confines of the executive branch agencies. Members of the federal judiciary and their staff also received it, raising some obvious questions.
There is also the darkly hilarious FOIA potential: Requiring the entire federal workforce to literally write down and email what they did last week opens basically the entire government’s operation to Freedom of Information Act requests — not that this particular executive branch is likely to obey FOIA regulations, but I and many others might get some pretty funny documents in 2029.
The end result of this is unclear, but I heard from people at the Department of Health and Human Services and elsewhere that supervisors are telling their staff not to respond at least until Monday, when they can discuss the best move. Other reports are out there that agency heads themselves have said no one should respond and a single top-down message will go back to the OPM address. The most likely effect, and perhaps the underlying point, was to sow more chaos and harass the millions of civil servants who work for the government and generally hate — if they didn’t before, they’re all definitely getting there — the unelected drug-addled bigot pulling the strings these days.
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