The Trump administration this week began a plan to send email alerts to every single federal government employee from a single email address, confusing and worrying many workers about what’s coming next.
CBS News reports that the Office of Personnel Management, which manages the federal workforce, is testing a new capability that would allow the alerts to be sent to every single employee, about roughly 2.3 million people. Workers at multiple federal agencies initially didn’t recognize the sender, an hr-at-opm-.gov email address, and reported the email as spam.
OPM sent the messages overnight between Thursday and Friday, two officials told CBS.
“This is a new effort under this administration,” one official told CBS.
The effort is so new that even some I.T. offices in federal agencies flagged the email as spam. One anonymous federal employee sent a screenshot to CBS and said their co-workers weren’t sure if the email was legitimate.
“Everyone thought it was spam,” said the employee. “There was a flurry of messages, ‘Is this spam?’”
At a time when the new administration is closing various federal offices and proposing massive cuts to the government under Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” initiative, the new system’s potential worries federal employees.
“They had to send this this week, of all weeks? Really?” said CBS’s source. Only agency and department heads had advance notice of the email plan on Thursday, according to OPM officials. Some rank-and-file employees didn’t hear about the new plan until they received the first email, leading to Friday’s confusion.
White House officials didn’t respond to CBS’s questions about what the system will be used for. But looking at past comments from Trump and others close to his administration, the potential is vast and disturbing, with the possibility of upending some of our most critical federal agencies.
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