Washington The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) announced in a statement Friday that the administration of President Donald Trump is testing a new feature that would enable officials to email every employee of the federal government from a single email address.
With a single mouse click, Trump may be able to interact directly with millions of government employees from dozens of agencies at once thanks to the new capabilities.
The White House opted not to respond.
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In an attempt to extract savings and efficiencies from government systems, the initiative might benefit from the engineering expertise of Elon Musk’s team and is in line with the modernization objectives of the new Department of Government Efficiency, which is led by the tech billionaire.
Employees were instructed in an email sent by Musk when he took over Twitter in 2022 that they needed to be very dedicated, work long hours with great intensity, and that only outstanding performance would be considered a passing grade.
Notably, in order to indicate their desire to remain employed by Twitter, employees also had to click on a document.
On Thursday and early Friday morning, this system started sending test emails to federal employees at agencies, such as the departments of justice and state.
A few workers believed the email to be spam.
NBC News was informed by a federal employee that it appeared to be a phishing effort.
In a subsequent message, a Justice Department official advised that while the email should be regarded as trustworthy, anyone who has doubts about any other emails should use the agency’s phishing tool.
According to one federal employee, it is a group chat that is required by the federal government. Another person commented that the email felt like it was from 1984 because they had to answer “yes.”
An employee of the Justice Department texted, “A new system to communicate except that OPM has always had an emergency text and email system.” You must reply to the email with a “yes.” Perhaps they are testing who obeys orders mindlessly.