I hear Acting IRS Commissioner Doug O’Donnell will be announcing his “retirement” tomorrow. Next up in the hot seat, Melanie Krause.

Acting Commissioner Thunderdome continues.

There was a very important development today, still only little-noted in the national press. Government Executive magazine has a good piece on it. The news turns on a decision by the Office of Special Counsel, the head of which, Hampton Dellinger, Trump had only recently tried to fire before being blocked from doing so by a federal judge. The decision specifically deals with six federal employees, each from a different agency, who were recently fired as probationary employees as part of the DOGE purge. Technically, the decision only applies to those six employees. But in a way that is analogous, though not identical, to the way a court ruling works, the findings would likely apply to many other recent DOGE-terminated employees across the federal government.

After turning the entire Social Security Administration upside-down over this Elon Threat email, which I described barely a half hour ago in this post, an email was just sent out basically saying “never mind.”

“Pursuant to updated OPM guidance, responses to the email from sender “HR” dated Saturday, February 22, are voluntary. Non-responses are not considered a resignation.”

This seems to follow the OPM guidance memo issued on February 5th, which I described here this morning.

I just did some reporting where I got a tangible and upsetting wake-up call about the real-world impacts of Elon Musk’s weekend email stunt. You’ve likely heard that last week acting Social Security Commissioner Michelle King was abruptly compelled to resign after raising objections about DOGE accessing confidential Social Security information. She was replaced by a mid-level Social Security Administration data analyst named Leland Dudek, who at the time of his elevation was being investigated by SSA officials for providing to DOGE unauthorized access to SSA data. Presumably because Dudek is now the acting Social Security Commissioner, SSA is one of the federal agencies telling employees they must respond to the DOGE/Musk email. Because of this, the public’s access to the national Social Security 800 line is being immediately impacted.

One point about the Musk firing spree that was barely getting any attention at first is now starting to break through into mainstream media accounts: veterans are hugely overrepresented among federal civil servants, and even more so among probationary employees. They’re getting hit hard by these erratic and needless firings.

As you can see, we’ve been following this Elon Threat Email drama pretty aggressively over the weekend. But there’s a small but also large part of the story I flagged over the weekend which I now realize I hadn’t yet done a full post on here. Notwithstanding that what amounts to a prank email has had the entire federal government debating with itself over the last 48 hours, Musk’s own Office of Personnel Management says that federal employees never have to respond to any of these emails.

Yesterday I broke the news that the CDC has indefinitely shuttered the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS), a comprehensive federal data collection program “designed to identify groups of women and infants at high risk for health problems, to monitor changes in health status, and to measure progress towards goals in improving the health of mothers and infants,” which has been in operation since 1988. CDC ordered a halt to collection of 2024 data effective January 31st of this year and put the entire 2025 program on indefinite hold.

This matches of course with the general HHS-wide crackdown on public health and research. But it still wasn’t clear precisely why the program had been shuttered or whether it might ever come back. Based on my sources, I can now report that the issue does not appear to be the various ways that comprehensive research on pregnancy might be perceived as bumping up against controversies over abortion and other politicized issues of reproductive health care. The issue is what the administration calls “DEI.” The questionnaires include questions about racism, discrimination, sexual orientation and identity, and an array of questions which look at how socioeconomic status can affect health. Some but not all of those question were new as of 2023 and basically all of them have to go.

We’ve got a fascinating story unfolding with the new Musk email I reported on below. And yes, something can be fascinating while also being grave, dangerous and in its own way terrifying. Over the course of the evening top leadership at the FBI, the State Department, the VA, the Department of the Navy (to its civilian employees) and other parts of the government have explicitly instructed employees in their departments and agencies to ignore the email. Meanwhile the DOJ seems to be instructing its employees to follow it. (And yes, FBI is sort of under DOJ and that’s kind of weird but that’s where we are.)

I think anyone watching the whole horizon will sense something similar. But I wanted to state it clearly. Donald Trump and Elon Musk are if not hitting the gas than becoming more publicly aggressive and hostile just as a public backlash of great breadth appears to be forming and members of Congress are becoming skittish. This is a highly combustible collision in the making.

A short time ago Elon Musk posted this to Twitter.

I have now seen three separate copies of this email sent to federal employees in three separate federal agencies/departments. They’re all identical. In one of those cases it is to an agency where all but a literal handful of employees have been under a stop work order for more than a week. The emails have the subject line “What did you do last week?” followed by an urgent-response red emoji exclamation point.