BREAKING: Musk Takeover of OPM (Federal HR Office)

This is a paywalled article at Wired. But it makes a pretty good case that the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) is now basically being run at its highest levels by people installed by and working with Elon Musk. In other words, “DOGE” seems to be calling the shots at OPM, even though it’s run by people who aren’t even federal employees. Most of these people appear to come from Musk’s various companies. Wired declined to publish the names of two of the people because of their age. One graduated from high school last summer.

Some of this is already known. The nominee to run the agency, Scott Kupor, is a partner at the Andreessen/Horowitz VC firm. They’re aligned with Musk politically. So that’s consistent with the rest of the story. But it seems the upper echelons of the agency has already been stocked with a mix of Musk’s people and Republican operatives, notwithstanding the fact that this is a federal agency which is usually made up almost entirely of career staff.

This afternoon OPM sent out an email to civilian government employees offering them “buy outs” if they resigned from their jobs in the next 10 days (by February 6th). This has been reported by the Post and I’ve also received copies of the email directly sent to me by TPM Readers. (If you’re a federal employee: send me all the information/documents you have. We can also arrange to communicate through an encrypted channel.) The legal basis of these “buy outs” is dubious at best – though we need to learn more about that. It also seems highly questionable under what authorization the administration is dramatically trimming the entire federal workforce without any congressional authority. That said, the spending freeze already takes the administration fairly brazenly outside of its constitutional authority. But the whole picture comes into clearly view if this is being run and planned by people reporting to Elon Musk. This is essentially what he did when he took over Twitter.

This “buy out” email comes after an episode last week in which OPM was setting up a new distribution list that went over the org charts of individual government agencies and went directly to individual federal government employees. The “buy out” email and presumably other actions yet to come seem clearly to be what that was for.

One final detail, which is helpful with a view to future Supreme Court action: the newly installed General Counsel of the Office of Management and Budget (upstream of these actions described above at the Office of Personnel Management) is Mark Paoletta, the longtime consigliere of Clarence and Ginni Thomas.

Late Update: An addendum to this nonsense but confirming the overall story. After Elon Musk bought Twitter in November 2022 he sent out a notorious email to the company’s employees telling them they would have to agree to become “extremely hardcore” or accept a three month severance and leave. (To the best of my knowledge those people never received the severance but I haven’t checked on it in a while.) That email went out under the subject line “fork in the road”. That’s the same subject line of the “resign” email that went out this afternoon to all federal employees. I think we know who’s running this train.