Two anonymous federal employees have filed a lawsuit to block the Office of Personnel Management from using an email system that can bypass agency managers and directly contact every federal employee.
The lawsuit, without evidence, alleges that the email system potentially violates employees’ privacy rights and was not established in compliance with federal law.
Filed by two anonymous federal employees in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the class-action lawsuit calls for OPM to stop the use of the system until the agency can show that it’s lawfully conducted a privacy assessment.
The two employees accuse OPM officials of deploying the new server — which is said to be “retaining information about every employee of the U.S. Executive Branch” or potentially doing so through systems linked to it — in a “rapid” manner without building proper security measures into it or assessing the privacy impacts as required by the E-Government Act of 2002.
On Friday, OPM sent a mass email to employees across the federal government — though not every federal employee received it, including one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit — to test “a new distribution and response list,” asking recipients to reply “yes.” Over the weekend, federal employees received another test “to confirm that an email can be sent and replied to by all government employees.” Some agency and department heads gave guidance to their employees that the emails from OPM could be trusted.
The complaint goes on to say: “OPM has not conducted a PIA for this unknown email server or any system which collects or maintains Personally Identifiable Information (“PII”) obtained from its use,” nor has a chief information officer or equivalent agency official signed off on an assessment. Finally, such an assessment would need to be made publicly available for review.
“OPM’s failure to take these steps constitutes agency action unlawfully withheld or unreasonably delayed in violation of 5 U.S.C. § 706(1),” the lawsuit states. “Plaintiffs are being materially harmed by this inaction because they are being denied information about how these systems — which will be rich in PII about every employee of the U.S. Executive Branch — are being designed and used.”
As a measure of relief, the plaintiffs call for an injunction of the systems involved in the matter until OPM conducts the required privacy assessment.
The unnamed plaintiffs also share concerns about the security of the server or any systems used in the mass email operation, calling into question the encryption of email communications involved.
If accurately described, the lawsuit will not likely gain traction once the first Democrat judge in the DC Circuit rubberstamps it. Generally, actual damage rather than inchoate fears is required to prevail in a lawsuit. Part of the process is showing how you were damaged; the other party doesn’t have to prove you weren’t. But, of course, this is the DC Circuit, where the TDS-infected judges have been proven likely to sign off on any legal action if it opposes Trump; see Who Was Responsible for Using an Inapplicable Felony Charge Against J6 Defendants?
That said, if OPM is violating federal law on data security, it should take a deep breath and try to do things the right way. This appears to be a swiftly assembled system and, as we used to say in the Army, “we ain’t got time to do it right, but we always got time to do it over.”
This complaint seems more of a stalking horse than having any real concern about data security.
The main point seems to be a desire to stop the White House from communicating directly to the workforce. That’s easy to understand. Once the word from the top is fired into the email inbox of every federal employee, the ability of the press, the Democrats, and federal union leadership to lie and misrepresent is greatly reduced; see Democrats Lose Their Minds Over Trump’s Funding Freeze, Then Flat-Out Lie About Its Impact.
The lawsuit also targets Elon Musk and his DOGE group. It uses a Reddit post—yes, you read that correctly—as proof that federal employee data is being given to Musk’s AI venture.
It cites an anonymous Reddit post written by someone purporting to be an OPM employee that said the information is being directed to Amanda Scales, who recently became chief of staff at OPM. Scales worked at Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI until recently.
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It alleges that Melvin Brown II, who was replaced as OPM’s chief information officer last week, “was pushed aside just one week into his tenure because he refused to set up email lists to send out direct communications to all career civil servants. Such communications are normally left up to each agency.
“Instead, an on-prem (on-site) email server was set up. Someone literally walked into our building and plugged in an email server into our network to make it appear that the emails were coming from OPM. It’s been the one sending those various ‘test’ messages you’ve all seen.”
The post added: “We think they’re building a massive email list of all federal employees to generate mass [reduction in force] notices down the road.”
The post also alleges that employees have been instructed to share lists of those responding to the test emails with Scales. “But Amanda is not actually an OPM employee, she works for Elon Musk,” the post said.
The lawsuit alleges that the server and systems linked to it “are retaining information about every employee of the U.S. Executive Branch” and that it is “not sending these or other emails securely due to the rapid deployment.”
2/ The basis of the complaint is a Reddit post!!! pic.twitter.com/w4M8zx8sli
— Margot Cleveland (@ProfMJCleveland) January 28, 2025
Unfortunately, despite what Reddit says, Amanda Scales seems to be a federal employee and the Office of Personnel Management chief of staff. Leftist politics, like far-right politics, requires a boogeyman as a focus for hate. It used to be Haliburton, and then it was the Koch brothers. Now, it is Elon Musk. The longer he’s around and the more effective he is, the more every Trump action will be attributed to Musk.
Get used to this. Hopefully, the clowns filing this frivolous lawsuit will be outed and fired, but it is just the tip of the emerging iceberg. Already, Trump’s orders freezing federal grants and giving transgenders in the military their walking papers are the subject of lawsuits, and more are surely being considered.
