This post first appeared on Government Executive. Read the original article.
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More agencies are requiring their employees to follow an Elon Musk-backed request to submit approximately five things they achieved in the past week based on guidance obtained by Government Executive.
Late Friday, federal workers received an email from the Office of Personnel Management directing them to provide such information each week by Mondays at 11:59 p.m. ET. A similar email was sent out on Feb. 22, but the HR agency ultimately said compliance was optional.
After telling employees to disregard the first round, the Defense Department is now mandating its workers to respond to the email. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote in a Thursday memo that submissions should not include classified or sensitive information and that non-compliance could lead to further review.
The Health and Human Services Department on Monday morning sent an email saying employees are “expected” to respond and to exclude the names of other HHS workers, to ensure that the information cannot be used to determine what specific scientific research is being undertaken and to assume that malign foreign actors could access the submission.
About an hour later, HHS distributed an updated email that employees are “required” to respond and scratched the line about malign foreign actors.
The Homeland Security Department, which instructed workers not to reply to the initial email, told employees for the second round to send their responses to a department email address. The State Department said agency leadership would respond on behalf of the workforce.
OPM told government employees not to send classified or sensitive information. If all of a worker’s activities are classified or sensitive, they should write “All of my activities are sensitive.”
Musk, a centibillionaire who is leading the Trump administration’s effort to shrink the federal government, ahead of the first round of emails posted on his social media platform X that not responding would be treated as a resignation. This time around, however, he said the emails are more of a pulse check than a performance review.
“Are they alive and can they write an email?” Musk said at a Cabinet meeting on Wednesday, according to an official pool report.
In a Saturday email, the American Federation of Government Employees told members to seek guidance from their supervisors on whether and how to respond, while acknowledging that the union believes OPM lacks the authority to request such information. AFGE is part of a lawsuit that is seeking to stop such emails and protect employees who don’t respond.
Nextgov/FCW previously reported that the OPM emails possibly violate the privacy policy associated with the system used to distribute them because responses are not “explicitly voluntary.” Also, Nick Hart, president and CEO of the nonpartisan Data Foundation, told the news outlet that it likely cost more than $30 million to send out the initial mass email.
Hannah Quay-de la Vallee, a senior technologist at the nonpartisan nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology, said in a statement, after the first round of emails, that the order could create “a honeypot of valuable, ill-protected information.”
“Demanding that more than two million federal employees email five bullet points about their work to OPM raises serious security questions,” she said. “Collecting more than 10 million potentially sensitive data points through notoriously insecure means like email, to create a repository that did not exist 48 hours ago, is a security nightmare.”
Eric Katz contributed to this report
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