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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.
I work for the federal government. OPM is called the government's HR, but they're more like the government's HR policy group and each agency has it's own HR that handles day to day things. So OPM sets a rule like all time cards will use code 10 for work time and 20 for annual leave etc so each agency can hire software that complies with OPM's time reporting standard and they can get competitive bids, but day to day at each agency the agency HR will onboard employees and write policies that take OPM standards and apply them to the agency's needs.
In a corporate world this is more like an industry orgnaization suddenly deciding they need a copy of your last weekly progress report (because every single bureacracy I have ever been involved with requires employees to report to their manager their progress) on things and those go up the chain at higher more general aggregation. And yes that might be legitimate if htey want to flood congress with them for some reason but when it is it's going to be accompanied by support from all the member corporations that yes this is different but we will benefit from doing this.
There's also a bunch of not classified but private information which carries penalties if it's disclosed. Most of this can be shared but it requires an agreement between agencies where they agree how the shared information will be used and protected. So it's not just writing a summary of activities it's writing a summary of activities that is approved to send outside of any of these agreements.
It also caught every agency head flat footed which is why you see directives to their line employees differing and sometimes flip floping.
Further and this is the part that really upsets me, it violates OPM's own policies about using this email address which are supposed to include a note to employees that all responses to the email are completely voluntary and employees are always able to opt out by ignoring the email. Requiring a response violates the Privacy Act (congress makes all sorts of rules that limit the executive in various ways) which is why government employees move so slowly, especially on new things they have to make very very sure they aren't violating any of those rules.
This seems too absurd to be true but it's apparently not even the most absurd bit of this law. The federal government is restricted from collecting PII on its own employees, which includes mere names and email addresses, without it being necessary to accomplish a purpose authorized by law or executive order.
The federal government is not one single organization. If you work for the VA or the USPS, you have as much right as any other US citizen not to have your PI (yes, even just your work email) handed over to the FBI or the IRS without going through proper authorization.
Why?
Because J Edgar Hoover and Nixon abused it.
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Why should a government agency need permission to access your data? I guess that's a question whose answer hinges on your opinion of the government and what its limits should be. But if you're okay with the FBI and the IRS and the NSA looking up anyone they want any time for any reason, sure, then federal employees should not be immune. Or are you arguing that by virtue of being a federal employee, you should not have the same privacy rights as other US citizens?
Why should the executive not be able to look up employee PI like emails.
Just like my CEO can look at my email and give it to anyone they damn want to in their company why can’t the president do the same?
It's not the President asking for the information, it's an anonymous email from OPM. Which, contrary to what people keep saying, is not the "HR department" for the federal government. They have zero authoriity to do this. Musk does not have unlimited authority, transferable to whoever he has sending emails from OPM, because Trump told him to "be more aggressive."
If they are executing a request from the President, the President needs to say so.
The President can presumably ask for anyone's .gov email address, but that's not what's happening here.
Sure you can say those things. It doesn’t make it true. Again you are suggesting that the OPM (an executive department within the WH) can’t get employee emails?
Are you sure they have zero authority?
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