OPM employees file suit to block use of new email system

Two Office of Personnel Management (OPM) employees are asking a court to block the agency from using computer systems and emails connected with its buyout offers to federal employees.

It’s the latest battle in a suit that alleges OPM violated the law by sending out emails purporting to be from “hr@opm.gov” — assembling a new dataset without accounting for how it would protect federal workers’ sensitive personal information.

Asking federal employees to reply to that email appears to have been a first step in OPM’s work to assemble a list of federal employee emails ahead of offering the “Fork in the Road” buyout package to nearly all employees — a brainchild of Elon Musk.

“The evidence suggests that, at some point after 20 January 2025, OPM allowed unknown individuals to simply bypass its existing systems and security protocols and install one or more new systems to ingest and store vast quantities of PII about Executive Branch employees … for the stated purpose of being able to communicate directly with those individuals without involving other agencies,” the suit states, using an abbreviation for personally identifiable information (PII).

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“Absent a prohibition from this Court, OPM will continue to operate computer systems containing vast quantities of PII which are more susceptible to cyberattacks than the preexisting OPM systems, and OPM will continue to insist that Executive Branch employees send yet more information to those systems.”

OPM did not respond to a request for comment.

The request for a restraining order against the use of the new system comes as the federal government is pushing employees to respond to the buyout offer by Feb. 6.

The agency has also been accused of allowing employees outside of OPM to install a server, a nod to a Reddit post.

If the request is granted, OPM would be forced to disconnect its server until it can construct a plan for how to protect employees’ data, a requirement of the E-Government Act of 2002.

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The federal government did not previously have the capability to mass-email all federal employees, as most communications come directly from the departments where employees work.

House Oversight and Accountability Committee Democrats earlier Tuesday said that “acquiring such a capability securely and in compliance with federal cybersecurity, privacy, and procurement laws would likely not have been possible in such a short timeframe.”

They asked for a list of employees who installed the equipment, the authority under which they were hired, and whether they faced background investigations — a nod to a Reddit post saying employees outside OPM installed the server.

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