When leadership of the Department of Health and Human Services finally issued its delayed instructions on how to respond to Elon Musk’s exercise in absurdity on Monday, the work day was already over. The message, viewed by Splinter soon after it was sent, came in a few minutes after 5 pm ET, and offered more guidance than many other agencies provided: “There is no HHS expectation that HHS employees respond to OPM and there is no impact to your employment with the agency if you choose not to respond.”
But it was after that blanket disavowal that things got interesting. Notably formatted into five bullet points — just as the original OPM email asked for from 2.3 million federal employees — HHS told staff that if they did choose to respond they should maintain a “high level of generality” and protect all sensitive or identifying information. If they were involved with scientific or medical research, the response should not name any drugs or devices or anything else that could specifically identify the work in question. And finally, bullet point five, the real “call is coming from inside the house” moment:
“Assume that what you write will be read by malign foreign actors and tailor your response accordingly.”
This is, obviously, a wild warning for government employees theoretically emailing another government employee. It is not clear whether HHS intended to call Musk and his minions the malign actors, or to just state the obvious that those minions have proven themselves so incompetent in the past month as to make it likely that any interaction with them will be wide open for actual foreign actors with a bit of IT competence to read. In a sense, it doesn’t matter which it is.
Elsewhere in the government, while the top-down messaging eventually made it clear that responding was voluntary, many employees did try and answer in good faith. A source inside the Department of Agriculture said that “a shocking number of my colleagues” responded even though the USDA leadership reiterated its voluntary nature. “Many spent a lot of time sincerely trying to justify their jobs,” said the source, who did not themselves respond. “People genuinely want to ‘do the right thing’ in this situation, but there is no right thing.” Damned if you do — specifics of the message, fed into some fatally flawed AI system, probably used to target employees; damned if you don’t — target those federal email addresses that did not respond at all.
At the Department of the Interior, now run by Trump lackey and oil industry booster Doug Burgum, two sources told Splinter that leadership did instruct staff to reply to the email and to copy a new doi.gov email address set up specifically to receive the responses — there was an implication that this might be made into a weekly requirement, though there was no real guidance on how exactly to answer.
One DOI employee sent well over the five required bullet points with relatively detailed information on very complex topics related to their highly skilled, highly trained position. The employee was worried nonetheless, given their job’s specifics: “I honestly don’t think it matters what I do,” the source said. “I will be fired.” They had been out working in the field much of the day on Monday, and then stayed late in their office in order to answer. They ended up “sending this poorly written word vomit so I could go home and eat dinner.” Even a conservative estimate of this episode would suggest that Musk has already wasted millions of person-hours of government employee time — meetings, time spent writing the responses, even time spent thinking about its implications, all that could have been spent on actual job functions.
A source at the Department of Veterans Affairs said they were given very little instruction on what to include in their responses, so they tended to put very generic points that more or less doubled as job descriptions. “All of this has been extremely unsettling,” the source said, adding that they were aware of multiple colleagues preparing to leave the department. “Messaging has been all over the place and changing daily…. It’s been a mess. Veterans are very stressed as well, as they are worried about their benefits and their health care.”
At the National Institutes of Health, inside HHS, staff seemed largely reluctant to participate even before the “malign foreign actors” guidance came down at the end of the day. One source there suggested Musk’s meddling might eventually be walked back to a similar but lesser requirement, perhaps involving emailing direct supervisors such a list every week. “Something demeaning without the immense security risk.”
The variance in guidance from across government agencies offers at least some glimpse of the degree of bootlicking now present at the top of those agencies, a sort of Toadying Scale for which members of Trump’s Cabinet might actually care about standing up for their employees, or who at least might be chafing at the influence of the unelected centi-billionaire running things. “It is hard to watch the cruelty to hard-working people,” a source at the USDA said, “and the lack of spine in leadership to fully support and stand up for their people.”
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