Latest news with #opm.gov
Boston Globe
01-03-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
Federal workers start to get a new email demanding their accomplishments
Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up The second email was expected to be delivered in a different way, according to the person with knowledge of the situation, potentially making it easier to discipline employees for noncompliance. Advertisement Instead of being sent by the Office of Personnel Management, which functions as a human resources agency for the federal government but doesn't have the power to hire or fire, the email was to come from individual agencies that have direct oversight of career officials. But a version of the email received late Friday by some employees at two separate agencies — with the subject line, 'What did you do last week? Part II' — came from 'hr@ the same OPM address that sent the first version. 'Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets describing what you accomplished last week and cc your manager,' the message read, adding that going forward, employees would be expected to submit a response each week by the following Monday at 11:59 p.m. Eastern. It's unclear how national security agencies will handle the second email. After the first one, they directed employees not to write back because much of the agencies' work is sensitive or classified. Less than half of federal workers responded, according to the White House. Advertisement The version viewed late Friday by The Associated Press reads in part: 'If all of your activities are classified or sensitive, please write, 'All of my activities are sensitive.'' That may not eliminate all security concerns given that sending an email creates a digital footprint regardless of the message's content. A spokesperson for OPM did not immediately respond to a request for clarification Friday night. On Wednesday, at Trump's first Cabinet meeting of his second term, Musk argued that his request was a 'pulse check' to ensure that those working for the government have 'a pulse and two neurons.' Both Musk and Trump have claimed that some workers are either dead or fictional, and the president has publicly backed Musk's approach. Addressing people who didn't respond to the first email, Trump said 'they are on the bubble,' and he added that he wasn't 'thrilled' about them not responding. 'Now, maybe they don't exist,' he said without providing evidence. 'Maybe we're paying people that don't exist.' In addition to recent firings of probationary employees, a memo distributed this week set the stage for large-scale layoffs and consolidation of programs. The Education Department offered employees a $25,000 buyout and warned of looming layoffs. An email sent to all agency workers gave them until the end of Monday to decide on the offer, which was touted as coming 'in advance of a very significant Reduction in Force.' It was sent from the department's chief human capital officer. The agency did not immediately offer comment. Gomez Licon reported from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Associated Press writer Collin Binkley in Washington contributed to this report.
Yahoo
26-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
What I Did Last Week: An Email to Elon Musk
To: hr@ From: Timothy Noah Subject: What I did last week Dear Elon Musk, Last Saturday, you sent an email from the foregoing address demanding that every federal employee (about two million people) inform you, in five bullet points, how they spent the previous week. 'Failure to reply will be taken as a resignation,' you announced on Twitter. Trump backed up that threat Monday. 'What he's doing is saying, 'Are you actually working?'' Trump said. 'And then, if you don't answer, like, you're sort of semi-fired or you're fired.' Cabinet officers treated these threats as the lunatic rantings of a senile commander in chief and his ketamine-fancying enabler—which they are—and advised federal workers not to respond. You don't even run the Department of Government Efficiency, according to a White House filing in a lawsuit brought by state attorneys general against DOGE. You also don't run the Office of Personnel Management (which sent out that email at your behest). Indeed, you possess 'no actual authority to make government decisions,' according to Joshua Fisher, director of the White House Office of Administration. Speaking in Miami two days later, Trump contradicted that: 'I signed an order creating the Department of Government Efficiency and put a man named Elon Musk in charge.' That White House of yours has some message-control problem! What I hope we're seeing, Elon, is the beginning of the end of your government career. On Monday, even the Office of Personnel Management advised government managers to 'exclude personnel from this expectation at their discretion,' even as you tweeted that 'subject to the discretion of the president,' a second email would be sent and 'failure to respond a second time will result in termination.' Failure to respond a second time won't result in diddly. Shame on you for scaring federal workers by pretending that it will. Instead of federal employees answering hr@ I gather is an email account set up exclusively to transmit your petty harassment—I'd like to see ordinary citizens crash it with a tsunami of messages telling you how they spent their last week. Or loading it up with other spam. That email address, again, is hr@ The New Republic used to have a feature called Washington Diarist, which then-editor Michael Kinsley, a raging Anglophile, modeled on the Diary features in British magazines and newspapers. I wrote a fair number of these, but that was way back in the 1980s, so don't fault me if I'm rusty. Here, in five bullet points, is my last week: On Saturday I set up a Trump Sieg Heil Tracker on my Substack newsletter, Backbencher, to archive every instance since January 20, 2025, in which a Trump official or prominent Trump supporter got caught on video throwing a Sieg Heil salute. You, of course, kicked off this trend at an inauguration rally. Later you denied you intended a Nazi salute. The Anti-Defamation League, cravenly, backed you up, even though you once accused the ADL of promoting 'de facto anti-white racism.' Later, after a boycott got started against X for allowing pro-Nazi posts, you visited Auschwitz and said you'd been 'naïve' about antisemitism. Still later, you threw that Sieg Heil salute at the Trump rally. It was pretty unmistakable. Writing in Die Zeit under the headline 'A Hitler Salute Is a Hitler Salute,' Lenz Jacobsen wrote, 'There's no 'probably' or 'similar to' or 'controversial' about it. The gesture speaks for itself.' Why am I bringing this up now? Because at the Conservative Political Action Conference last weekend, speaker after speaker mimicked your Sieg Heil, typically after repeating 'My heart goes out to you,' which is what you said before your Nazi salute. I counted four Sieg Heils at CPAC; there may have been more. After Steve Bannon threw one, Nick Fuentes, who has told Jews to 'get the fuck out of America,' had to admit: 'It's getting a little uncomfortable even for me.' On Monday I finished a lengthy piece for a forthcoming print issue of The New Republic. That's how I spent most of last week, actually, and the week before that. Journalism is a deeply satisfying trade, but describing how it's done is boring ('I make phone calls, I read stuff, I go over my notes'), so I'll leave it at that. I don't want to give away what the article's about, but you won't like it. On Saturday I saw Kunene and the King, written by and starring John Kani, at the Shakespeare Theatre Company here in Washington, D.C. The play riffs on King Lear, with Lear an aging white South African actor now dying of cancer and Cordelia a male nurse trying to keep him off the booze, played by Kani. They argue about the long shadow of apartheid and who's to blame for continuing poverty and crime under Black-majority rule. South Africa is your nation of origin, right? And I know you have an interest in white nationalism. You should see the play! I last saw Kani onstage 50 years ago in a Los Angeles production of his play Sizwe Banzi Is Dead. It was on tour, after playing in New York and winning Kani a Tony. On Kani's return to South Africa, police showed their pride in their cultural ambassador by beating and stabbing Kani and leaving him for dead. Kani lost an eye in the incident. You, Elon, would have been about 5, so you're off the hook. Monday night I saw Peter Beinart, a former New Republic editor, speak at my neighborhood bookstore about his new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza. The book is excellent (also short), and I strongly recommend it. Among its points is that in the 1970s the accepted definition of antisemitism largely shifted from 'prejudice against Jews' to 'recognition of Palestinians as human beings.' One consequence (this part is me, not Beinart) is to let antisemites who support Israel firmly enough entirely off the hook for their Jew-hating, a tradition that began with Richard Nixon. Disappointingly, Beinart, a devout Jew, said he isn't getting many invitations from synagogues to discuss his book, even though Jewish people are famously in love with disputation. Beinart drew a big crowd at Politics & Prose bookstore, though, and faced only one foul-mouthed heckler, who failed to make her beef clear before being escorted out. Her bile was directed not at Beinart but at his interlocutor. I don't know whether the heckler was a MAGA devotee or a DOGE enthusiast, but she was certainly rude enough to be. I started reading The Mirror and the Light, the concluding novel in Hilary Mantel's trilogy about Thomas Cromwell and the court of King Henry VIII. A dramatization starring the great Mark Rylance will be televised next month, and I liked the previous two books too much to allow the third to be spoiled for me. Like its predecessors, the final installment does a brilliant job conjuring the dangers of working for a monstrous chief executive. For further reading I recommend Lawrence Stone's memorable New Republic cover essay 'Terrible Times' (link works only for TNR subscribers), in the issue dated May 5, 1982. This was a review of the collected letters of Henry VIII's uncle Arthur Plantagenet (a.k.a. Viscount Lisle) and his family. It says a lot about this essay that I remember it 43 years later. Stone evoked brilliantly 'the most ferocious period of arbitrary and bloody tyranny in English history.' Sound familiar? That's my week, Elon. I did some other stuff too, but you limited me to five bullets. Can I keep my job? All best, Tim
Yahoo
24-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The True Purpose of Elon Musk's Weekend Email Ultimatum to Federal Workers
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Elon Musk's siege of the federal government entered a new phase late Saturday afternoon, when he announced on X that federal workers would soon be receiving an email 'requesting to understand what they got done last week,' adding, quite ominously, 'Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.' A few hours later, millions of federal workers received the promised email sent from the Office of Personnel Management account hr@ the same one Musk used to send his 'Fork in the Road' email back on Jan. 28. The message asked workers to reply with '5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager,' giving them until Monday night to complete the task. The email further urged workers not to send classified information in their replies. Musk's threat from earlier was conspicuously absent. The email was eerily similar to one Musk sent out shortly after buying Twitter, demanding that its software engineers email him a bullet-point summary of their code modifications and '10 screenshots of the most salient lines of code,' a directive that IT professionals at the time criticized as a uniquely bad way to assess code. The same could be said of Musk's latest email, which presses multitudes of federal employees across many fields of expertise to justify their jobs to a mysterious axe-wielding entity that couldn't possibly understand the work they all do. Understandably, the email sparked immediate panic among federal workers over the next move that might come from Musk, who only days earlier had shown up onstage at the Conservative Political Action Conference wearing sunglasses, slurring his words, and wielding a 'chain saw for bureaucracy.' Musk, who is not funny, also used the appearance to complain about 'the left's sense of humor.' It's unclear why Musk's 'Nonresponse equals resignation' threat doesn't also appear in the email, but one might plausibly speculate that an attorney intervened, given the Merit Systems Protection Board's unequivocal finding that a federal worker's resignation must be 'affirmative' and 'voluntary,' as a matter of 'fundamental fairness and due process.' Of course, the email also declined to even acknowledge Musk's widely published threat, guaranteeing no small amount of fear, loathing, and confusion among the recipients, a list that evidently includes federal judges and their clerks, and even the FBI, prompting Director Kash Patel to issue a message to his staff to 'pause' any response 'for now.' Despite the email's instruction to withhold classified information, encouraging federal workers to describe their jobs in emails sent to Musk's untested private email server seems at best unwise, from a security and privacy standpoint. In a Privacy Impact Assessment dated Feb. 5, a week after Musk's Department of Government Efficiency team plugged in an untested email server, authors Riccardo Biasini and Greg Hogan, both of DOGE, essentially argued that there was no need to conduct a PIA for its 'Government-Wide Email System.' The reason DOGE's email server should be considered exempt is because the system would be used only for '(1) the names of federal employees, (2) their government email addresses, and (3) short, voluntary email responses' (emphasis mine). Biasini's and Hogan's retroactive justification for the use of the server accords with the way it was applied in the sending of the 'Fork in the Road' email, and the responses it anticipated. But Saturday night's email from OPM is 'voluntary' only if you ignore Musk's threat from earlier that day, and the responses it invites are open-ended. In other words, after retroactively manufacturing a basis for the legality of the email server, DOGE and Musk crossed over the line they themselves drew. Federal agencies are already required, per 5 USC Section 4302, to establish appraisal systems to rate employees' performance. The agencies are constrained to use 'objective' standards and criteria appropriate to the particular employee being evaluated. The email from hr@ exists entirely outside this framework, starting with the fact that the OPM isn't an agency. As Kevin Owen, a partner at Gilbert Employment Law, explained to me, 'OPM has a limited mandate and oversight capacity—by design, it can't issue instructions to workers of the various agencies. Unless you work for OPM, you don't report to OPM.' Owen characterized the email as the 'least efficient thing they've done so far,' suggesting that Musk may have created litigation opportunities for plaintiffs' attorneys if workers can bill the time they spent responding to the email as overtime. Yet, it seems certain that many federal employees will respond by the Monday night deadline. The National Institutes of Health sent an email informing its workers to 'read and respond per the instructions.' A similar order was sent out by Department of Agriculture management, according to a worker there. But the State Department and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration joined the FBI in telling its workers to pump the brakes. Space News reported that NASA struggled to come up with a unified response, ultimately advising workers to refrain from replying. The National Treasury Employees Union, which represents the Department of Health and Human Services and the Food and Drug Administration, strongly advised its members not to respond, noting the lack of coordination with the FDA and expressing concern about workers' rights and interests. Musk himself appears to be conceding that the OPM email and his threat were a pretext, suggesting in a post Sunday morning that his purpose is to test bodies for a pulse. 'The reason this matters is that a significant number of people who are supposed to be working for the government are doing so little work that they are not checking their email at all!' He further claimed, without evidence, that 'non-existent people' or the 'identities of dead people' are being used to collect paychecks. Dead voters have long been a fixation for the right, no matter how often these claims are debunked, so it seems natural that these imaginary zombie voters would one day take government jobs. A minor irony to Musk's dead-workers-collecting-paychecks claim is that Musk himself is apparently a legal ghost, heading, but not really heading, DOGE, a quasi-legal entity that is presently enjoying all the authority of a congressionally created federal agency without any of the reporting and transparency obligations. Compelling civil servants to answer to an unanswerable fourth branch of government, as Rep. Jamie Raskin puts it, seems not only unprecedented but uniquely un-American. For Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget and the architect of Project 2025, the primary motivating factor behind his proposal to make it easier to fire federal workers is clearly malice, per his statement previewing his actions last year: 'We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected.' For Musk, a relative newcomer to far-right politics, it seems to be more about domination and the lulz, as the kids used to say. More than one worker has used the term mind games to describe to me Musk's treatment of them. In playing these mind games, Musk is ignoring the rules of the game that the rest of the country has at least tried to follow for more than two centuries. Armed with the president's acquiescence and blessing, not to mention Congress' complicit silence, Musk is playing the federal government in God mode. He unlawfully repurposed and modified—colloquially, hacked—OPM using this unprecedented access to treat government workers as nonplayer characters, answerable to him above their agencies. Unfortunately for the remaining federal workers, who never signed up to take part in an eccentric billionaire's nihilistic simulation, these days are painfully real.
Yahoo
17-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Judge rules against federal employees suing Trump admin for privacy concerns
A federal judge has ruled against federal employees who sued the Trump administration over privacy and security concerns around a government workforce email distribution system. The new computer server was used to send deferred resignation "Fork in the Road" emails to more than 2 million federal employees, offering them to leave their government jobs and get paid through September, or risk being laid off. Judge Restores Trump Administration's Buyout Offer To Federal Workers DC-based federal Judge Randolph Moss denied a request for a temporary restraining order (TRO) that would have blocked the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) from continuing to use the email address HR@ and is known as the "Government-Wide Email System." The lawsuit claimed that in the rush to adopt this new system, OPM violated security safeguards for federal workers, known as a Privacy Impact Statement (PIA). Here's What Happened During President Donald Trump's 4Th Week In Office Read On The Fox News App But in denying emergency legal relief, the judge said, "Plaintiffs have failed to carry their burden of demonstrating that their .gov email addresses (which reveal their names and, possibly, their places of employment) are at imminent risk of exposure outside the United States government— much less that this risk is a result of OPM's failure to conduct an adequate PIA. Rather, their arguments 'rel[y] on a highly attenuated chain of possibilities.'" According to the lawsuit, soon after Trump took office, federal employees received emails from the email address HR@ that indicated the agency was running tests for a new "distribution and response list." "The goal of these tests is to confirm that an email can be sent and replied to by all government employees," one of the emails said, according to the lawsuit. Workers were asked to acknowledge receipt of the messages. The case will continue on the merits in the courts, but for now the new communications system will remain in place, pending any article source: Judge rules against federal employees suing Trump admin for privacy concerns
Fox News
17-02-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
Judge rules against federal employees suing Trump admin for privacy concerns
A federal judge has ruled against federal employees who sued the Trump administration over privacy and security concerns around a government workforce email distribution system. The new computer server was used to send deferred resignation "Fork in the Road" emails to more than 2 million federal employees, offering them to leave their government jobs and get paid through September, or risk being laid off. DC-based federal Judge Randolph Moss denied a request for a temporary restraining order (TRO) that would have blocked the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) from continuing to use the email address HR@ and is known as the "Government-Wide Email System." The lawsuit claimed that in the rush to adopt this new system, OPM violated security safeguards for federal workers, known as a Privacy Impact Statement (PIA). But in denying emergency legal relief, the judge said, "Plaintiffs have failed to carry their burden of demonstrating that their .gov email addresses (which reveal their names and, possibly, their places of employment) are at imminent risk of exposure outside the United States government— much less that this risk is a result of OPM's failure to conduct an adequate PIA. Rather, their arguments 'rel[y] on a highly attenuated chain of possibilities.'" According to the lawsuit, soon after Trump took office, federal employees received emails from the email address HR@ that indicated the agency was running tests for a new "distribution and response list." "The goal of these tests is to confirm that an email can be sent and replied to by all government employees," one of the emails said, according to the lawsuit. Workers were asked to acknowledge receipt of the messages. The case will continue on the merits in the courts, but for now the new communications system will remain in place, pending any appeal. This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
