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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   38860 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 2025

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Some thoughts on the infamous OPM e-mail:

Whether the OPM e-mail asking federal employees to send a five bullet point list of what they achieved in the last week to a OPM e-mail address apparently controlled by Musk and/or @DOGE has turned into an even bigger scissor statement that is usual for US partisan politics. What is going on? (Well, it seems like it was an unconventional proof-of-liveness check on the federal employee base with no plan to read the responses, but I am more interested in the response)

First point - if this came from management, it would be a completely reasonable request. It would be odd if it came from senior management rather than your direct line manager (does a top executive have time to read all those replies?) but not necessarily irregular. It is the kind of thing I can absolutely imagine the CEO doing at a founder-mode startup with a few thousand employees. But it didn't come from management. It came from HR (literally, in the sense that the sender shows up as "HR" in Outlook, and in practice in that it came from OPM, which is effectively HR for the civilian federal government). Indeed, it came from an anonymous role account in HR. (Musk tweeted that the e-mails originated with him, but two courts have ruled, at Musk's request, that Musk is a notorious shitposter and it is legally unreasonable to take a Musk tweet seriously, so they are still legally anonymous)

If I received such an e-mail from HR in my day job at a bank (and I don't think any other large manager-mode organisation would be different), it would be unprofessional to do what the e-mail says and send a quick response cc my direct line manager. In a normal corporate (or, I assume, public sector) environment, you take at least some steps to make sure you don't accidentally become a patsy in someone else's political maneuver against your boss or department. So if I got such an e-mail, my immediate response would be to forward to my line manager* with a note saying something like "Not sure what is going on here - will hold off on replying until you are able to investigate" - and if I did eventually reply, I would agree the reponse with my manager. But the more likely outcome (unless senior management had been warned about the exercise beforehand) would be that the rapid large-scale escalation would lead to the head of the department sending an all-staff e-mail saying "Please don't respond until we have investigated what is going on here" and trying to get hold of someone in the CEO's office urgently. (And struggling to do so, because every senior manager in the organisation would be doing the same thing).

And this is just looking at the office politics perspective, From the infosec angle, this is worse. The e-mail said "don't send classified information", but if you work in a job where you are actually trying to keep secrets, there isn't a short, safe unclassified summary of what you did last week. I am not an expert on the US classification system, but I do know that producing an unclassified summary of classified information (including, for example, the classified information you worked on in the last week) is difficult work that only a few people in each department are qualified to do. The rule in corporate finance departments at banks (where almost all staff have access to market-moving non-public information such as upcoming mergers) and it is "Do not discuss live deals with anyone outside the department, even in general terms." For a corporate financier, sending a meaningful response to that e-mail would be a firing offence. The various department heads (including Trump's own political appointments like Kash Patel) in national security related departments who told their staff not to respond are doing the obviously correct thing.

tl;dr - the freakers-out are right - sending out an all-staff e-mail of this type from HR was irregular, and would have been massively disruptive to any large organisation other than a startup used to working around a hyperactive micromanaging founder-CEO.

* If the rumours are true that Musk is sending these e-mails from a jury-rigged server rather than an official secure US government system, then the e-mail would show up as external in Outlook, and my actual immediate response would be to report it to IT security as a possible phishing attack.

We can use observed evidence to distinguish between the two scenarios. Did OPM have the authority, either formal or practical, to ask for this? Is this normal or unusual?

Well:

Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) staff were initially told to reply but then received a Sunday evening email asking them to "pause" responses pending additional guidance. Late Monday, a third email told employees, "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."

That includes the State Department, where a senior official told staff that the department would respond on its own behalf, according to a screenshot of the communication obtained by NPR. "No employee is obligated to report their activities outside their Department chain of command," the official's email said.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright also asserted his department's authority to manage his staff in a message to employees on Sunday that NPR has seen. "The Department of Energy is responsible for reviewing the performance of its personnel and will conduct any review in accordance with its own procedures," Wright wrote. "When and if required, the Department will provide a coordinated response to the OPM email." His email used identical language to a message sent by the Defense Department the same day and also seen by NPR.

Some of the most high-profile federal agencies ended up bucking Musk’s demands, with the Justice Department, State Department, Pentagon, FBI, Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Energy all telling staff not to respond to the email.

Elon Musk, who recently threatened federal workers with termination if they did not respond to an email asking what work they completed in the last week, said Monday workers who did not reply will get another chance to do so at President Donald Trump’s “discretion”—the latest development over the emails after a growing number of agency heads, including Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard, told their employees not to respond.

I don't think you'd see this if this wasn't unusual and strange.

Also, the thing where Elon tweeted people would be fired for not responding (and the recent second chance), but that wasn't actually in the e-mail - and the combination of Elon's threat of firing, the ambiguity about his power to do that as the leader of DOGE, and the shifting and differing guidance in replying between agencies - is terrible management, and I think demonstrates that Elon does not have a careful plan and is not acting with a huge amount of competence in this case. He's not acting like a strong leader, he's not establishing that his orders are followed - he's creating an image of someone who's a bit unstable, who's lashing out, claiming more power than he actually has. If you actually want Elon to control the government, stuff like this doesn't help!

Isn't this just Musk's intention? I'm sure he could do it in a more orderly fashion if he wanted but that wouldn't express his disruptive intent and contempt for bureaucracy as clearly. The version of reality where everyone instantly obeys him without checking with their bosses is what he's working towards I suppose but it will require employees who check their brains at the door and have a clear loyalty to a single leader rather than a line manager, job function or their own ideas about their job. (Cough, fascist.)

Is it? If I imagine myself in a random federal employee's position, the events around this email would make me update towards "it's safe to ignore Musk and proceed as usual". Organised people who are methodical in prosecuting their grudges are scarier than cholerics with limited attention span who randomly lash out - if you just give the latter enough to lash out at, eventually they will just start swinging their arms wildly without hitting anything.

Yes, wouldn’t it be scarier if Musk focused on only one agency, established sort of a protocol/playbook to clean it up and then moved to the next? Currently this looks like a scatterbrained approach.

On reflection I'm inclined to change my mind and agree with this and the post before. I do think doing it this way signals his allegiance clearly (he sees the whole of government administration as the enemy). And if he were to simply fire everyone who didn't reply, THAT would create an incendiary effect. But I agree the message currently being sent is that his main objective is just getting attention.

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