HHS Warns Against Elon Musk Email: May ‘Be Read by Malign Foreign Actors’
February 25, 2025
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Aila Slisco is a Newsweek night reporter based in New York. Her focus is on reporting national politics, where she has covered the 2020 and 2022 elections, the impeachments of Donald Trump and multiple State of the Union addresses. Other topics she has reported on for Newsweek include crime, public health and the emergence of COVID-19. Aila was a freelance writer before joining Newsweek in 2019. You can get in touch with Aila by emailing a.slisco@newsweek.com. Languages: English.
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The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) warned employees on Monday that emailed responses to Elon Musk’s demand that federal workers justify their employment may be “read by malign foreign actors.”
Newsweek reached out for comment to HHS via email on Monday evening.
Why It Matters
Musk, head of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), on Saturday warned “all federal employees” that failing to respond to an impending email with details of their work activities would be “taken as a resignation” in a post to X, formerly Twitter.
Hours later, all federal workers received an email from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) demanding that they respond by listing “approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week” by 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time Monday.
Several government agencies, including the Department of Defense, the FBI and the Social Security Administration, have since instructed workers that not responding to the email will not impact their job status.
Elon Musk is pictured wielding a chainsaw at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Oxon Hill, Maryland, on February 20. Elon Musk is pictured wielding a chainsaw at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Oxon Hill, Maryland, on February 20. Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
What To Know
An email sent out to all HHS employees shortly before 5 p.m. Eastern Time Monday states that there is “no HHS expectation that HHS employees respond to OPM and there is no impact to your employment with the agency if you choose not to respond.”
The email goes on to list guidelines for employees who choose to respond to the OPM email, including an eyebrow-raising suggestion that responses should be written under the assumption that they will be intercepted and read by hostile foreigners.
“Keep your response at a high level of generality and describe your work in a manner to protect sensitive data, personally identifiable information, and applicable privileges to the extent possible,” the HHS email states.
“Assume that what you write will be read by malign foreign actors and tailor your response accordingly,” it continues.
This is a developing story and will be updated as more information becomes available.
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