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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.
That expectation doesn't exist in the private sector. The boss is expected to have access to everything you do on company devices.
If Alphabet wants to import all of Waymo's email comms for training Gemini, they have that right.
Or if they suspect employee X is barely or not-at-all working, they can dig around without needing to check with the employee first.
Maybe it would make sense to place limits around criminal investigations, but not giving the employer carte blanche to view the data generated by their employees on company devices is just hamstringing the employer's ability to manage its employees.
This is total bullshit. Your line manager and probably anyone above you within your department in most cases has access to everything you do, but outside your department this is not the case at all. Internal firewalls exist in many companies for many, many departments, especially where legal, compliance, auditing, HR or similar issues are concerned.
They do, but the way this would presumably happen is that someone at Gemini would ask someone above them at Alphabet if this was possible, this senior manager would then decide and then they would inform someone senior at Waymo that they should co-operate with Gemini and send them X tranche of data, and this would get passed back down the chain of command to whoever actually would do the work of facilitating the use of the data. What would absolutely not happen is that someone senior at Gemini would just email a low-level data manager at Waymo saying 'please send us all your email comms'.
The point of this is that Trump might have the right to request any piece of data from within the government, but Musk/DOGE are not automatically vested with his powers simply because they were appointed/created by him. Kash Patel (for example) does not answer to Musk, he answers to Trump. If there is to be a request for information on what all his employees do, then it has to go up the chain to Trump and down again to the FBI.
At least at my job, which is a large company but not government large, people generally know who the CEO's lieutenants are. If one of them asks for something directly, beyond verifying it's not a phishing attack, and unless I needed to push back because I knew it was going to break something, I'd just do it and send a note to my manager.
Email is almost never used here, nearly all comms are internal chats on our own platform, so phishing is pretty unlikey.
And if the CEO or his lietuenants wanted to look at all my emails, they'd just ask the department responsible for that, without any need to justify themselves. They can also look at everything on my phone, they can even view a live stream of my desktop.
Fair enough, though that's generally at odds with what I've experienced.
Even in this case though I don't think Musk is firmly established as being more Trump's Lieutenant than any of his Cabinet appointees. What powers he has actually been vested with and how they interact with department heads seems pretty unclear, so it's pretty understandable that the latter don't want to set the precedent that Musk can now take decisions for them or act over their heads. I have to imagine that in your or anyone else's workplace that if anyone was doing anything on this scale they would never do it without at least consulting/warning the heads of department. If someone working with (but not actually on the instruction of) the CEO sent an email to everyone in finance saying 'send me X information on your productivity or I might sack you' without even informing the CFO (or COO or whoever) the latter would usually be justifiably furious.
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