Over the weekend, Elon Musk surveyed his followers on X — the platform he spent $44 billion to buy — asking whether federal employees should be required to send his team an email with a list of five things they accomplished this week. With the yes votes totaling over 70%, Musk followed through. Federal employees received an email from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) this weekend, requesting their weekly list of accomplishments by 11:59 p.m. ET on Monday.
“Consistent with [President Donald Trump’s] instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week,” Musk wrote on X. “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”
With millions of employees across the federal government, the DOGE-operated email address and the contents of the email were bound to leak. As federal employees are threatened with losing their jobs, people on social media platforms like Reddit, TikTok, Threads, and Bluesky are calling on each other to spam the now-public email address with nonsense.
This is a common tactic of online resistance when something like a controversial form for public comment or email address gets out.
In one case, so many people sent the complete script of the “Bee Movie” — a recurring internet joke — to an anti-trans “snitch form” in Missouri that the tip line was taken offline. People responded similarly to a Texas state inbox tracking gender marker changes on driver’s licenses, as well as an anti-trans bathroom complaint form in Utah.
This online vigilantism sometimes coalesces within particular communities, like the K-pop fandom. In 2020, Dallas police requested that people send them videos of illegal activity taking place during protests following the police killing of George Floyd; instead, fans of Korean superstars like BTS spammed the police department’s app with nonsensical fancam videos.
Trump’s detractors have employed these tactics since the first week of his term, when his administration set up dedicated email accounts requesting that employees report noncompliance with the president’s executive orders to dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. Workers were threatened with imprecise “adverse consequences” if they withheld information about efforts to “obscure the connection” between DEI initiatives and government contracts.
Though OPM is a longstanding government agency, these new dedicated specific email addresses are new. Federal employees first received an email from the OPM’s HR email address in January, testing whether it could be used to contact all government workers in one email blast. This move sparked a class-action lawsuit from two whistleblowers who claim it violates federal privacy law to create this brand-new email server without following established security measures.
These security protocols are in place for a reason. In 2015, the OPM was hacked, compromising sensitive data from security clearance background checks for 21.5 million people. That included the Social Security numbers of each of these individuals, as well as biometric data from 1.1 million people. Musk’s DOGE team, meanwhile, has been granted unprecedented power and broad access to these government systems with little resistance.
It’s unclear how effectively DOGE will be deterred by this mass spam campaign. Since ordinary people do not have .gov email addresses, it’s possible that Musk’s team could just filter their inboxes for government-only email addresses. The inbox could also collapse under the sheer volume of mail it will receive; if Musk’s DOGE team is using a physical server, then the amount of data it can contain is finite.
Though it’s possible these efforts could be futile, people who resist Musk’s policies are not deterred — after all, it doesn’t take very long to copy and paste the complete script of the “Bee Movie” into an email.