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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.
Unpopular opinion: they should've quit bitching and just done it.
Musk is playing 5D chess, demanding an objectively simple task to demand compliance/submission and using it as leverage to secure more power. He knows that a lot of the chronic /r/fednews posters will have a massive hysterical breakdown and is counting on it to give him more political power and make these people look ridiculous and out of touch. A normal person thinks 'that's easy' and has little sympathy.
It should not take even 5 minutes to produce a list of 5 things you've done this week if you've been working seriously. If you're dealing with secret information, you ought to be smart enough to obfuscate a technically correct but secure answer.
The guy working on the top secret AI-powered satellite missile guidance system can say "I helped train a model and adjusted hyperparameters" or "Fixed bugs in the navigation software" and that's of no significant value to any adversary. If they have your email address and you work in the Advanced Aerospace Development department, they're going to expect that's what you're doing. It might break the sacred rules some bureaucrat thought up for individual/collective deflection of responsibility but normal people thinking wisely would not be worried about the Chinese finding out that Americans are designing aircraft or honing satellite guidance systems. They already know a hell of a lot more than that, the US MIC leaks like a collander and Chinese spying has been punching great big holes in it.
Okay, so what is the benefit to doge from a hundred thousand emails saying the moral equivalent of "bug fixes and performance improvements" / "updated localization files"? This level of detail is not enough to determine who is actually doing useful work (does anyone actually need that model that's being trained?) and at the same time the volume is too large to actually go through these emails and come to any conclusions, unless doge employs the ol' Ctrl+f as they did for scientific grants.
The benefit is sniping the people who kick up a huge fuss, performatively showing themselves as enemies and finding the employees that don't exist (who won't answer). Musk will drag up a few cases like the Spanish guy who never showed up for work in 12 years and was only uncovered when he got an award for dedicated service. It's half publicity stunt, half humiliation/submission ritual.
Also they'll probably run it all through Grok 3 and have it spit out something politically useful that some hysterical fed puts down in a moment of foolishness.
I've yet to see a job where complaining about your task is grounds for termination and I don't even work in the public sector.
Or employees who happen to be on vacation when Musk sent this email (or the upcoming final warning, apparently).
It must surely be trivial, given musk's team's apparent level of access, to figure out when each employee badged in / logged in to their account.
last(1)has been around for probably sixty years and I know at least my company has a database with every single badge swipe. That would actually be a useful signal, but that's not what we're looking at.I think they "probably" won't because they haven't done this yet and I don't see why they would start. Not that you could actually fit all this into grok's context window anyway.
It's not so much termination as identifying and outmanoeuvring opponents. Their optimal narrative is 'Help evil billionaire Musk is making us cut critical services like kidney machines', not 'Help, evil billionaire Musk is making us explain what we got done last week'. He's forcing them to play his game.
If I were running fake employees, I'd arrange for them to log in on the clock. But it'd be a little harder for them to achieve things and send email. The smarter cheats will create some fake responses quickly but I expect he'll catch out some of the stupider/slower ones who can't access their faked emails or make other errors trying covering it up. He's fishing for anecdotes and political power with this tactic.
Also, you can scan text over multiple context lengths.
As far as I can tell, the opponents here are all civil servants, so consider the opponents identified. It's not obvious to me how demanding snippets from them is outmaneuvering and I don't feel that it's been made clearer by this thread.
I don't get it. We're postulating that managers in the civil service are hiring people who don't do anything and faking their logins and badge swipes (presumably the managers are personally benefiting in some way), but sending an email with some bullshit bullet points is a bridge too far to keep the gravy train rolling? Doesn't pass the sniff test. If they can log in they can send an email.
Actually achieving things is neither necessary nor sufficient to send this email, and it's not proof either way.
How, exactly? We already agreed that many of these updates could/should be of the "bug fixes and performance improvements" format due to classified work. There's no way to detect who's doing useful work and who isn't at that granularity.
I don't see why this is necessary given that he can basically just make anything up and people will believe it at this point (see the claim of millions of 150 year olds collecting SS).
Much like your motivated-misunderstanding here identifies you as an enemy of Musk, sentiment analysis of the responses will identify other federal employees unable to sufficiently disguise their animosity towards DOGE and the Trump administration.
If you weren't motivated to misunderstand you would realize that they aren't looking for people who don't do work, they are happy enough to create a proscription list of feds who fail to disguise their contempt in their email responses.
Perhaps those people aren't stupid and are also engaging in motivated-misunderstanding. If it bothers you, that means it's working. This is current year +9, 9th year of the post-truth era, you should have caught on by now.
I am pretty sure nearly all federal employees are against this because the stated goal of this administration is to make them (the federal employees) miserable. Don't need to send an email to figure that one out.
Official guidance from the chain of command is now for federal employees not to respond to these messages (see other comments on this topic), undercutting both Musk's stated goal of getting responses to these emails as well as his authority. I guess they should have started with login times!
Who said I'm bothered? People believe the damndest things.
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