A tip line meant to encourage federal employees to rat out their colleagues for working on diversity issues is instead apparently being spammed with movie quotes and colored pencil drawings.
Charles Ezell, the acting director of the Office of Personnel Management — basically the federal government’s HR department – sent a memo to agency heads Tuesday, encouraging them to send a letter to employees asking them to report “efforts by some in government to disguise these programs by using coded or imprecise language.” The letter threatens “adverse consequences” if federal workers choose not to report their coworkers.
Workers can expose their colleagues, the letter says, by emailing a tip line at [email protected].
The memo says the tip line is part of an anti-DEIA — that is, “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility” — campaign across the Trump administration, which includes putting employees in DEIA offices on paid administrative leave, taking down public DEIA-focused websites and canceling DEIA initiatives. President Donald Trump has come out hard against diversity programs, including by revoking a landmark executive order signed by former President Lyndon Johnson that prohibited discrimination by federal contractors, and by pressuring private businesses to ditch DEIA practices. Various parts of this anti-DEIA push could face legal battles.
Versions of Ezell’s letter have been spotted throughout the government, including at the departments of Homeland Security, Health and Human Services and State, as well as NASA.
And the internet has responded as you might expect: with calls to bombard the email tip line with spam.
Various social media users have discussed sending the account the scripts of “The Bee Movie” and “Space Balls”, as well as dirty “Simpsons” references; signing it up forpornwebsites, the Satanic Temple and LinkedIn; and reporting their unnamed white coworkers and Trumpnominees as “unqualified” diversity hires. Others have simply taken aim at Elon Musk.
An OPM spokesperson declined to comment on whether a wave of spam to the email account had affected its operation.
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It’s possible the public displays of contempt for the effort are all for naught – OPM could filter for messages from “.gov” accounts, for example. But a similar spam campaign against an Immigration and Customs Enforcement tip line for “immigration crime” during Trump’s first term “fully upended the system, leaving operators unable to answer more than 98 percent of incoming calls during the protest as the media relations team attempted to contain the narrative,” as The Verge reported in 2018.
A test email HuffPost sent the OPM email account did not bounce back, indicating that at very least, it reached its destination.