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.
After landing at the Office of Personnel Management in January, DOGE operatives first order of business was to set up a new email system through which all federal employees could be emailed through a single distribution list. They built it on a new server system outside of the established government email system. But emails it sends come to civil servants from the email address HR at OPM dot gov. This new system was given the name Government-Wide Email System (GWES). On February 5th, 2025 — in other words, well after the Trump and more specifically Musk was in charge of OPM — OPM published this document, Privacy Impact Assessement for GWES. As you can see here, most specifically in sections 4.2 and 4.3, federal government employees are never obligated to respond to any GWES emails and are under no obligation to share any information. Indeed, section 4.3 says that to mitigate the risk that the federal employees may not realize this, every GWES email should “explicitly stat[e] that the response is voluntary.”
To the best of my knowledge, there has been no subsequent guidance from OPM overruling or contradicting this clear guidance.
