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.