Winston Churchill once said, “nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.” One might also say there’s nothing so fun as being right about a big story totally by accident. Or rather, in this case, I actually knew about what I’m about to describe to you but forgot. Early February was at least a hundred years ago and I’ve been working on a million different stories since then and I’d totally forgotten. But seriously, people, let’s not make it about me.
Here’s the story.
As you know, Elon Musk went on Twitter on Saturday and said federal workers had to list their accomplishments for him or else. The email was sent out over something called The Government-Wide Email System (GWES), a DOGE creation from the first days after the takeover of the Office of Personnel Management. (This will be a key point.) The email itself didn’t itself include that termination (or technically a constructive resignation) threat. But the message was heard loud and clear. Then pretty much the entire federal government spent 72 hours trying to figure out whether it was required or it wasn’t. On Sunday morning I flagged this Privacy Impact Statement (PIA) which OPM prepared for the GWES system back on February 5th. That document was flagged to me by a government tech. And as I noted it states very clearly that any emails you receive via GWES are totally voluntary. You can respond to them or not. You can share information or not. It’s totally up to you. It’s very clear.
But I didn’t really have any clear idea of why this document existed or why it made such strong representations about the voluntariness of anything tied to GWES. (As is often the case, Marcy Wheeler had already put it a lot of this together even though I hadn’t.)
Well, here’s the story.
