Government Wide Email System
The Government Wide Email System is an email service set up by the newly hired proteges of Elon Musk, who worked for the Department of Government Efficiency.[1]
Emails from this system appear to come from the Office for Personnel Management.[2] Three email from this system have triggered controversy.
- A "test" message arrived in the email stream of millions of individuals with emails under the
.govdomain. - An email with the subject line, "fork in the road" was sent out in early February.[2] It offered employees generous short term retirement benefits, if they voluntarily retired in the next week.
- An email with the subject line, "What did you do last week was sent out, on Saturday, telling recipients to submit an email with five bulleted points, describing their activities in the previous week. It's deadline was midnight, Monday. While the letter did not say what would happen to recipients who failed to reply, by the deadline. However, Elon Musk tweeted that individuals who did not meet the deadline would be considered to have resigned.
References
[edit | edit source]- ↑ Why the Five Things Email Failed. Legal Eagle. 2025-03-08. Retrieved 2025-03-09 – via YouTube.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1
Brian Bennett (2025-02-07). "As Musk Targets Federal Data, Obscure Agency Plays Key Role". Time magazine. Archived from the original on 2025-02-07. Retrieved 2025-03-09.
Federal workers came to quickly understand how much OPM was changing on Jan. 28, when most of them received an email from a new government-wide email system originating from within the agency. It offered them eight months’ pay in exchange for their resignation. (Shortly after those emails went out, employees at agencies like USDA and NOAA said their email accounts were inundated with spam.) The buyout offer is currently in limbo, after a U.S. district judge temporarily blocked it in response to a lawsuit by labor unions.