Elon Musk Wants to Use His Chaotic Emails to Track Federal Workers
Elon Musk is planning to once again prompt federal workers to tell him what they accomplished with their week, and is apparently hoping to make it a regular part of government work, The Washington Post reported Friday.
Last week, federal employees received a message from a human resources email at the Office of Personnel Management asking them, “What did you do last week?” and prompting them for a bulleted list of five activities. Failure to respond would be tantamount to a resignation, Musk warned separately on his social media site that federal workers probably don’t use to the same degree he does. His authoritarian threat summoned a flurry of outrage and trolling, and an all too predictable lawsuit.
Several agency heads warned not to respond to the email, and eventually, OPM stepped in saying that replying to the email was voluntary. This week, they’re planning to bring it back, but this time, with a twist.
Federal workers are expected to receive another email in their inboxes Saturday, from addresses that are associated with the chiefs of agency human resources departments, rather than from the OPM, two people familiar with the plan told the Post.
This would give a stronger mechanism for gathering information, as those individuals would have more authority than the OPM within their own agencies. While Musk has tried to use the OPM as his chainsaw, on Thursday, a federal judge ruled that the office did not have the authority to demand mass firings across other agencies. This change to the email plan reflects the limits of the OPM’s power.
But Musk and the OPM apparently have even bigger plans for their strange bid to get federal employees to tell on themselves: a Microsoft form.
Documents reviewed by the Post showed that department heads planned to elicit the crucial five bullets of information from government employees by developing Microsoft forms that would make the responses mandatory. The information collected would be shared with department heads, and would not be released externally.
One person briefed on the government’s plans confirmed all of this, and said that the responses would become a weekly requirement.
Donald Trump claimed that the email was somehow intended to catch out nonexistent government employees—but the true purpose has emerged: to see how closely federal agencies are following the president’s agenda and sweeping executive orders, even as they face an onslaught of legal challenges.