As you probably know a second version of the Elon/DOGE threat email went out this weekend, actually on Friday evening, and it’s due tonight at 11:59 PM. From what I can tell everyone in the leadership of the different agencies, with like one and a half exceptions, has gotten their ducks in a row and now everyone has to respond. I haven’t done a systematic survey. I’m not even sure that’s possible. But every agency or department I’ve heard about or from is telling their employees they have to reply. So that mix of kinks, bobbled communication and soft insubordination seems all ironed out now.
The only exception I’d heard about before mid-morning was the Commerce Department, which is odd since Secretary Lutnick appears to be as tight with Trump as almost anyone in the administration. A Commerce Department guidance email says that employees should reply with the requested information but send it to their supervisor. They are not required to send it as a reply to OPM/DOGE. Not sure what that’s about.
But just a short time ago the Pentagon, whose leadership has been heavy on the Elon train, sent out new guidance that civilian employees needed to comply with the 5 accomplishments but that they would need to submit to a special DOD email address. You submit to your supervisor and then it all gets consolidated together and sent to OPM. They include some language about some more review of DOD “procedures.” So it seems like they’re probably taking the same route as Commerce, though Commerce is a little more vague about just what they’re doing.
An additional fun/telling detail: HHS employees got an email this morning instructing them to comply with the same ‘write like a “malign foreign actor” will see it’ text as last time. Then about an hour later they got another version of the email without it.
One rumor or belief that’s been circulating for the last week has been about the part of the emails which says to write the email and cc their supervisor. A lot of people think that that is to enable DOGE to create a government wide org chart, which could be helpful in a number of ways. At this point I’m inclined to think that is true. With these couple million emails that would be very simple to do. It doesn’t require any AI. I could almost write the code. (Yes, I have an ancient and very limited coding history.) And there’s really no other reason why they’re insisting on it. There’s zero about DOGE which shows any concern about keeping established supervisory chains in the loop on your communications with DOGE. Quite the opposite actually. Perhaps AI will be used for other stuff, if they make this a weekly exercise going forward, as they claim. But that seems like the only reasonable explanation of the cc part of the instruction.
Late Update: Very interesting. From what I can tell the State Department is one of the few departments and agencies and perhaps the only one telling its employees again not to worry about responding to ElonMail II. There also seems to be a bit of variance at the regional level within the VA.
