How to Respond to the Five Bullets

As you know, last week, Musk posted on twitter that he was going to require all federal workers to list five things they did last week at work or face termination. Shortly thereafter, an email went out from hr@opm.gov asking federal workers to list five things they did the week before, but left out the termination language.

Chaos ensued, with some agencies telling their employees to ignore the email, and other agencies telling their employees to respond. Then on Sunday, a lawyer representing seven government employees and contractors over privacy violations sent a rule 11 sanctions motion to the DoJ lawyers working on the case, reminding them that their own OPM privacy assessment submitted to the court as part of that lawsuit said that any responses to OPM emails were voluntary.

The next day, OPM walked back their position and told the agencies that responses were voluntary, but then filed a new privacy assessment that had removed the language about responses being voluntary.

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So here’s what I would do. I would write up a plan to complete this weekly assignment and get your supervisor’s buy-in to create a layer of insulation for yourself. If things go sideways, and the agency wants to fire you for your answers being insufficient, you can point to the fact that your supervisor agreed to the plan and that you were complying with their instructions.

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