Reuters reports that people linked to Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” have locked civil servants in the Office of Personnel Management out of computer systems that manage millions of federal employees’ personal data. As the government’s human resources agency, OPM controls the Enterprise Human Resources Integration database, which includes the names, addresses, social security numbers, pay grades and length of service of government employees, according to two officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity. They also told Reuters that while affected civil servants can still log in to the system and perform basic functions like sending emails, they can no longer access these massive datasets that cover the entirety of the federal workforce, which their agency is tasked with maintaining. “We have no visibility into what they are doing with the computer and data systems,” one of the officials said about Musk’s activities. “That is creating great concern. There is no oversight. It creates real cybersecurity and hacking implications.”
Separately, Musk’s team has attached a new email server to the OPM offices tasked with sending out mass emails to every federal employee. The hardware tacked on to the existing system is apparently not secure, leading to a number of spam messages being sent to the over 13,000 employees at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration from outside actors. Musk’s team also used the OPM system to send a mass email to every federal employee offering a “buyout” and encouraging them to use the funds and time off to visit a “dream destination.” Many outlets have noted that the wording is similar to a “buyout” email Musk sent to all the workers at Twitter when he bought the company in 2022. One of the officials at OPM who spoke to Reuters told them that they had no idea that such messages were going out from their agency, saying that they “are finding out about these memos the same time as the rest of the world.”
Musk’s surrogates took control of OPM as soon as Trump was inaugurated on January 20th, moving sofa beds into the government building in order to work around the clock, again echoing Musk’s modus operandi when he bought Twitter in 2022. The team he has installed at the agency includes Brian Bjelde, the vice president of human resources at SpaceX, who is now a senior advisor at OPM. Amanda Scales, who used to work at Musk’s AI company xAI, is now the Chief of Staff for the agency, and Riccardo Biasini, an engineer who has worked at Tesla and Musk’s tunneling venture The Boring Company, is also a senior adviser at the agency. The new people brought in by Musk have pushed out OPM’s chief management officer, Katie Malague, moving her out of her office into another one on a different floor.
Musk’s “hostile takeover” of OPM, as one official from the agency put it to Reuters, reflects a similarly brusque approach at other government agencies. David Lebryk, the highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department, resigned yesterday after a dispute with Musk’s surrogates over their desire to have access to the department’s highly sensitive payment system, which distributes trillions of dollars every year from the federal government to everyone and everything it funds – from defense contractors to national parks.
The Trump administration is currently facing a flurry of lawsuits over the management of government agencies run by the executive branch. Three lawsuits were filed as soon as Trump was inaugurated, seeking to shut down Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” until it complies with transparency rules related to government advisory entities (despite the name, DOGE is not a government “department,” which would require an act of Congress to establish). Another lawsuit filed this week alleges that Amanda Scales is improperly funneling federal employees’ information directly to Musk in violation of the E-Government Act of 2002, which requires federal government agencies to conduct Privacy Impact Assessments before creating databases that store personally identifiable information.
