Lawsuit Filed To Stop Trump Admin From Emailing Entire Civilian Federal Workforce At Once

Two anonymous federal workers filed a lawsuit during the first week of the Trump administration to stop the implementation of a new email distribution system that would send communications to the entire civilian federal workforce.

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has been testing a system allowing Trump administration officials to send emails to 2.3 million federal employees at once, the agency’s website announced. The announcement was posted on January 23, just two days after President Donald Trump was inaugurated.

Bloomberg Law reported that the feature would allow senior members of the Trump administration “to communicate directly with staff across the government, rather than relying on managers to distribute information.” It could help communicate the administration’s orders more clearly and cut down on malicious compliance, where federal agencies target popular and necessary programs to make the administration look bad.

A recent example is Trump’s pause on certain federal spending, specifically focusing on “ending DEI, the green new deal, and funding nongovernmental organizations that undermine the national interest.” The pause specifically exempted programs like Social Security and Medicare, but Democrats and their media allies insisted those programs were being targeted and that the most vulnerable of citizens were being targeted.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), for example, claimed “Trump shut off Medicaid” because the website portal went down following his announcement.

It is unclear why the portal went down, but White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt immediately issued a statement saying, “No payments have been affected – they are still being processed and sent.”

The pause on such funding has been blocked by a federal judge anyway, The Daily Wire reported.

The two workers who filed the lawsuit to stop the all-staff emails argue that the feature could violate privacy laws and that the OPM must first conduct a review to see how the system collects personal information.

The lawsuit seems to stem from a Reddit post where a self-described OPM employee claimed that incoming political appointees have “sent numerous requests to all the agencies to collect information on gov’t employees” and that the information must be sent to a woman who works for Elon Musk, who heads up Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency and is attempting to streamline the federal government and cut wasteful spending. The lawsuit provides no evidence this is actually the case.

The lawsuit further argues that such a system could be open to hacking, without remembering that OPM was hacked in 2015 during the Obama administration, and nearly 22 million people inside and outside the federal government had their personal information stolen.

Almost every business in America has the ability to send all-staff emails and no one has thought to sue over privacy concerns. The argument that the government needs to go through a bureaucratic process just to send an email was also mocked online. Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle said the lawsuit was “playing into Trump’s hands.”

“‘My employer, the Federal government, can’t mass email me until there has been a systematic bureaucratic review of how much information the Federal government, which employs me, will need to send the emails’ is not a valid complaint, and if this actually works, it would 100% justify blowing up the bureaucracy and replacing it with people who aren’t idiots,” McArdle posted on X.

C’mon, guys, this is just playing into Trump’s hands. “My employer, the Federal government, can’t mass email me until there has been a systematic bureaucratic review of how much information the Federal government, which employs me, will need to send the emails” is not a valid… https://t.co/Rf2l7XZAVB

— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) January 29, 2025

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