OPM’s New Email System Prompts Lawsuit

Two federal employees have filed a class action suit about the Office of Personnel Management’s new email system. The suit, which you can read below and which was filed in federal court Monday, alleges that OPM didn’t follow federal law that requires an assessment of privacy implications for any piece of information infrastructure.

The agency began to send mass emails to every civilian employee of the federal government on January 23. But, as David DiMolfetta reports for NextGov/FCW, “just days before President Donald Trump’s inauguration, OPM did not have the capability to send a mass email of that scale, according to a person familiar with the matter.”

The suit, whose plaintiffs seek to remain anonymous due to what they say are fears of retaliation, cites an apparently deleted Reddit post that claims that lists of employees were collected and sent to Amanda Scales, who works for Elon Musk. OPM’s emails from this server are not encrypted, the plaintiffs say, and are vulnerable to hackers. Any collection of information used to contact individuals are subject to the E-Government Act of 2002, the suit says, which requires a Privacy Impact Assessment first.

The same system appears to have been used to send OPM’s buyout offer to federal employees. The title of that email, “Fork in the Road,” echoes one Musk sent to employees of Twitter after he took it over in 2022, Zoë Schiffer reports for Wired. Musk runs President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, an office whose existence is the subject of a different lawsuit filed by the same DC-area public interest law firm, National Security Counselors.

“We are all shaking our heads in disbelief at how familiar this all feels,” former Twitter engineer Yao Yue told Schiffer.