Career civil servants have been denied access to computer systems that hold the personal information of millions of federal employees by aides to Elon Musk, who is in charge of the U.S. government human resources agency.
As part of his sweeping government overhaul since taking office 11 days ago, President Donald Trump has fired and sidelined hundreds of federal servants to reduce the bureaucracy and install more loyalists.
Musk, the billionaire Tesla CEO and X owner entrusted by Trump to decrease the size of the 2.2 million-strong civilian government workforce, has worked rapidly to install supporters in the agency known as the Office of Personnel Management.
Some senior career employees at OPM have had their access to some of the department’s data systems revoked.
“We have no visibility into what they are doing with the computer and data systems,” one official stated, “and that is creating great concern. There is no oversight. It creates real cybersecurity and hacking implications.”
The systems include a large database called Enterprise Human Resources Integration that contains the dates of birth, Social Security numbers, appraisals, home addresses, pay grades, and length of service of government employees.
Officials who were impacted by the change are still able to log in and use features like email, but they are no longer able to view the enormous statistics that encompass every aspect of the federal workforce.
Rather than using the typical dry language of government letters, OPM has issued memos urging public servants to explore buyout offers to resign and enjoy a trip to a “dream destination.”
According to Don Moynihan, a professor at the University of Michigan’s Ford School of Public Policy, the activities within OPM sparked questions about congressional control of the organization and Trump and Musk’s attitudes toward the federal bureaucracy.
“This makes it much harder for anyone outside Musk’s inner circle at OPM to know what’s going on,” Moynihan stated.
The influence of MUSK
On January 20, the day Trump took office, a group comprising Musk’s current and former staff took over OPM.
According to one of the OPM staff members, they have shifted sofa beds to the fifth floor of the agency’s headquarters, which houses the director’s office and is only accessible with a security badge or a security escort.
Laptops 1000The employee stated that the installation of the sofa beds allowed the crew to work continuously.
After assuming control of the social media site X (previously known as Twitter) in 2022, Musk, a significant donor to a notoriously demanding boss, constructed beds for workers to allow them to work longer.
“It feels like a hostile takeover,” the worker remarked.
According to authorities, OPM’s top management officer, Katie Malague, has been moved from her current office to a new one on a different level by the new appointees in control of the agency.
The actions taken by Musk’s aides at OPM and the chaos that other Musk aides generated inside the Treasury building, which was publicized on Friday, highlight the wide-ranging impact that Musk is having on the government.
According to the Washington Post on Friday, David Lebryk, the senior career official at the U.S. Treasury Department, is expected to resign after a confrontation with Musk’s supporters over their need for access to payment systems.
Software engineers and Brian Bjelde, who began working at Musk’s SpaceX company in 2003 as an avionics engineer and eventually became vice president of human resources, are part of the new OPM team. Bjelde serves as a senior adviser at OPM.
Among the group that now runs OPM is Amanda Scales, a former Musk employee who is now OPM’s chief of staff.
Since Trump took office, Charles Ezell, the acting head of OPM, has been sending memos to the entire government workforce, including Tuesday’s offering federal employees the chance to quit with eight months’ pay.
“No one here knew that the memos were coming out. We are finding out about these memos at the same time as the rest of the world,” one official said.
On January 20 and 21, Ezell sent several memos, including one instructing agencies to identify federal workers on probationary periods.
Another key adviser is Riccardo Biasini, a former engineer at Tesla who is currently a director at The Boring Company, Musk’s tunnel construction company in Las Vegas.
