The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) is claiming that its email system used to contact all Federal government employees does not pose a privacy risk, according to a Wednesday court filing.
The court filing comes after an initial lawsuit – filed by two anonymous Federal employees on Jan. 27 – claims that OPM violated the E-Government Act of 2002 by not issuing a required privacy impact assessment (PIA) before setting up the government-wide email platform.
In the latest court filing, OPM argues that the PIA was not necessary because the email system only deals with Federal employee data. OPM also issued a PIA on Wednesday along with the court filing, claiming that now the “case is moot.”
According to the original lawsuit, OPM – working with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) led by billionaire Elon Musk – sent an email about two weeks ago to Federal employees from hr@opm.gov. The email said it was a “test of a new distribution and response list” and instructed employees to reply “YES” to the message.
OPM sent out a second test, and shortly after, sent the “deferred resignation” proposal using the same email system.
The lawsuit cites a Reddit message from an OPM employee who claims that OPM’s former Chief Information Officer (CIO) Melvin Brown was “pushed aside just one week into his tenure because he refused to setup email lists to send out direct communications to all career civil servants.” MeriTalk previously reported on Brown’s replacement as CIO just one week after starting the new role.
“Instead, an on-prem (on-site) email server was setup. Someone literally walked into our building and plugged in an email server to our network to make it appear that emails were coming from OPM,” the employee continued in the Reddit message.
Nevertheless, OPM posted a statement to X on Wednesday refuting those claims.
“Reports about a private server being brought into OPM are FALSE. OPM has released a privacy impact statement regarding its government-wide email system,” the agency said.
In its PIA, OPM says that its email system operates entirely on government computers and in Microsoft mailboxes. It also notes that the only information collected or used by the email system are the names of Federal employees, their government email addresses, and voluntary email responses.
