Lawsuit claims systems behind OPM governmentwide email blast are illegal, insecure; Trump administration presents federal workers with ‘deferred resignation offer

A lawsuit filed in federal court Monday alleges that the Office of Personnel Management set up an on-premise server to conduct last week’s mass email blast to federal employees and store information it received in response without doing a privacy impact assessment on the system as required by law. Filed by two anonymous federal employees in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the class-action lawsuit calls for OPM to stop the use of the system until the agency can show that it’s lawfully conducted a privacy assessment. The two employees accuse OPM officials of deploying the new server — which is said to be “retaining information about every employee of the U.S. Executive Branch” or potentially doing so through systems linked to it — in a “rapid” manner without building proper security measures into it or assessing the privacy impacts as required by the E-Government Act of 2002.

The Trump administration said it is offering “deferred resignation” options to federal employees who agree to leave their positions within seven business days, the latest in a series of actions aimed at slashing the government’s workforce. In an email that the Office of Personnel Management said was sent to federal employees Tuesday, the White House presented government workers with a “deferred resignation offer.” Federal workers who accept that offer by Feb. 6 “will retain all pay and benefits regardless of your daily workload and will be exempted from all applicable in-person work requirements until September 30, 2025 (or earlier if you choose to accelerate your resignation for any reason),” the message posted on OPM’s website said.

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