Anamika Dey, editor
Brief news
- Elon Musk’s aides have restricted access to critical computer systems at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), locking out career civil servants from databases containing sensitive personal information of federal employees.
- President Trump has initiated a significant restructuring of the federal workforce, appointing Musk and his allies to key positions, leading to the dismissal of numerous civil officials and the promotion of a more loyal staff.
- The changes at OPM have raised concerns about transparency and cybersecurity, with reports of memos encouraging federal employees to accept buyouts and a perceived hostile takeover atmosphere within the agency.
Detailed news
According to two officials from the agency, aides to Elon Musk who are in charge of operating the U.S. government human resources office have locked career civil servants out of computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of federal employees.
President Donald Trump has been in office for 11 days, and he has already begun a major overhaul of the government. He has dismissed and sidelined hundreds of civil officials in his initial efforts to reduce the size of the bureaucracy and to bring in more devoted supporters.
Musk, the entrepreneur who owns Tesla and X and was assigned by Trump to reduce the size of the civilian federal workforce, which consists of 2.2 million employees, has quickly begun placing allies in positions at the Office of Personnel Management.
Two officials, who spoke to Reuters on the condition that their names not be revealed due to fear of punishment, stated that several top career staff at OPM have had their access to certain data systems within the department withdrawn.
According to the officials, the systems contain a large database known as Enterprise Human Resources Integration. This database includes the following information about government employees: dates of birth, Social Security numbers, appraisals, home addresses, pay grades, and length of service.
One of the officers stated, “We have no visibility into what they are doing with the computer and data systems.” “This is causing a lot of worry. There is no supervision. It has real consequences for cybersecurity and hacking.
Officials who are impacted by the change are still able to log in and use functions like email, but they can no longer access the large datasets that include information about every aspect of the federal workforce.
Requests for comment were not immediately answered by Musk, OPM, members of the new team, or the White House.
The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has distributed memos that avoid the usual austere language of official communications. The memos encourage public servants to consider accepting buyout offers to leave their jobs and take a trip to a “dream destination.”
Don Moynihan, a professor at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, stated that the measures taken within OPM highlighted questions about the agency’s legislative supervision and the way that Trump and Musk saw the federal bureaucracy.
Moynihan stated, “This makes it much harder for anyone outside Musk’s inner circle at OPM to know what’s going on.”
Musk’s impact
On January 20, the day that Trump was inaugurated, a team of current and former employees of Musk took control of OPM. According to one of the OPM employees, the agency’s headquarters has a fifth story that holds the director’s office. The only way to get to this floor is by using a security badge or by being escorted by a security guard. They have transferred the sofa beds to this floor.
According to the employee, the sofa beds have been set up so that the staff may operate 24 hours a day.
In 2022, Musk, a significant donor to a notoriously demanding boss, seized control of the social media company that was previously known as Twitter. He erected beds at X for staff so that they could work longer hours.
The employee stated, “It feels like a hostile takeover.”
According to the officials, the new appointees who are in command of OPM have relocated Katie Malague, the agency’s chief management officer, from her office to a new office on a different level.
Malague did not respond to a request for a comment.
The actions of Musk’s aides at OPM and the turmoil within the Treasury building created by other aides of Musk, which was disclosed on Friday, highlight the significant impact Musk is having throughout the government.
According to a report from the Washington Post on Friday, David Lebryk, the highest-ranking career official in the U.S. Treasury Department, is going to quit his position after a dispute with Musk’s associates, who requested access to payment systems.
Brian Bjelde, who started working for Musk’s SpaceX in 2003 as an avionics engineer and eventually became the company’s vice president of human resources, is part of the new team at OPM, which also comprises software engineers. Bjelde is a senior adviser at OPM.
Since Trump took office, Charles Ezell, the interim head of OPM, has been distributing memos to all government employees. One of these memos, sent on Tuesday, offered federal employees the opportunity to resign in exchange for eight months’ pay.
“Nobody here was aware that the memos were going to be released. “One of the officials stated that we are learning about these memos at the same time as everyone else in the world.”
Amanda Scales, who used to work for Musk, is now the head of staff for OPM. She is part of the gang that currently governs OPM. Ezell sent out three letters on January 20 and January 21, one of which instructed agencies to identify federal workers who were on probationary periods. In these memos, department heads were urged to send an email to Scales at her OPM email address.
Riccardo Biasini is another senior adviser. He used to be an engineer at Tesla and most recently worked as a director at The Boring Company, which is Musk’s tunnel-building enterprise in Las Vegas.
Source : Reuters, CNBC news
