The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has advised employees to respond to the Office of Personnel Management’s insulting email to the federal workforce titled “What did you do last week?”
“I am informing you that the email is valid,” Chris Syrek, the VA’s new chief of staff, told agency workers in a Sunday night message viewed by HuffPost. (The bold was Syrek’s.)
He added, “In responding to the email, please do not send any classified, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), or personally identifiable information, links or attachments.”
OPM sent an email to the government’s more than 2 million federal workers on Saturday demanding they justify their jobs. “Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager,” the instructions read, sparking a wave of outrage across the workforce.
Elon Musk, the head of President Donald Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, said on X, formerly Twitter, that any nonresponse would be considered a resignation. He gave a deadline of midnight Monday night.
The leaders of several federal agencies have advised employees not to reply to the email but instead await guidance from their managers. The American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal union, has said the OPM email is “unlawful” as it circumvents agencies’ authority and doesn’t “comport with OPM’s own regulations and guidance.”
A VA employee told HuffPost that many workers were outraged by the instructions from their own agency’s leadership to reply to the email and explain what they did last week.
“We are all furious about it,” they said in a message to HuffPost. “It is an attack on our integrity and values.”
The VA is headed by Doug Collins, a Trump nominee and former GOP member of Congress who was confirmed by the Senate earlier this month. The VA did not immediately comment when asked about Syrek’s advice.
The American Federation of Government Employees, which represents 800,000 federal workers, told members Sunday that they should “comply with any directive that has come from your agency.”
“Simply put, if your agency has asked you to reply, you should do so and highlight the important work that you do for the American people,” the union said.
It’s not normal for OPM, which manages the federal civil service, to send mandates directly to employees of other government agencies. But since Trump’s inauguration, OPM has served as a nerve center for the administration’s attacks on the civil service — including the legally sketchy deferred resignation program known as “Fork in the Road.”
Other federal agencies took a different tack from the VA when it came to Musk’s ultimatum, showing a willingness among some to resist OPM’s encroachment on their turf.
At the Department of Homeland Security, R.D. Alles, the agency’s deputy undersecretary for management, told employees Sunday that “no reporting action from you is needed at this time,” according to an email viewed by HuffPost. Alles said to “pause” any responses that would go outside the normal chain of command.
Kash Patel, the new director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, told employees that the FBI itself is “in charge of all our review processes.” “[F]or now, please pause any responses, Patel wrote, according to the New York Times.
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The State Department offered similar advice, according to the BBC. “No employee is obligated to report their activities outside of their Department chain of command,” Tibor Nagy, acting undersecretary for management, said in an email.
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