Hiring for Tech Roles Based on Perceived Loyalty is No Better Than Hiring to Meet Diversity Quotas
I saw lots of that in Sirius Open Source and we covered this after I had resigned in 2022
THIS article is the joint effort of 3 people. We recently assessed a very serious situation which can be treated either politically or as a purely technical matter (in reality it is a combination of both). We'll try to focus on what's technical to avoid getting caught in the "well, you're not in my team!!" handwringing. We'll try to say what happens here from a geek's perspective (not "political nerd's perspective").
About a day ago we quoted a report as saying that:
Populating the OPM with naive-yet-loyal yes men seems to be a key strategy in Trump's plan to drastically cut down the federal workforce. It also follows Musk's disastrous playbook at Twitter - the two young OPM hires are reminiscent of a move the billionaire pulled when he hired his alarmingly junior and inexperienced cousins to facilitate three massive rounds of layoffs as he took over the platform.
Wired was then quoted:
According to the same sources, other people at the top of the new OPM food chain include two people with apparent software engineering backgrounds, whom WIRED is not naming because of their ages. One, a senior adviser to the director, is a 21-year-old whose online resume touts his work for Palantir, the government contractor and analytics firm cofounded by billionaire Peter Thiel, who is its chair. (The former CEO of PayPal and a longtime Musk associate, Thiel is a Trump supporter who helped bankroll the 2022 Senate campaign of his protege, Vice President JD Vance.) The other, who reports directly to Scales, graduated from high school in 2024, according to a mirrored copy of an online resume and his high school's student magazine; he lists jobs as a camp counselor and a bicycle mechanic among his professional experiences, as well as a summer role at Neuralink, Musk's brain-computer interface company.
My personal interpretation of this is that the US Government has (more than ever before) been taken over by "tech oligarchs" or "tech bros" or "bro-ligarchs" or whatever. It's not an unprecedented issue, but it is getting worse all the time. Some days ago Dr. Andy Farnell published a detailed article about what's at stake. We'll soon have a long article focusing on Microsoft's extensive role in this.
Tribalism, whether based on political orientation or loyalty or kinship, is bad. It's bad because it tends to eliminate or demote those best suitable for some technical role. So it drags down the group as a whole.
In turn, as one might expect, there will be planes that crash, servers that suffer data breaches, or a patent office like the EPO (where corruption is the norm and managers aren't familiar with science, they just cover up for high-level colleagues - that's all that matters!).
What we're seeing right now is a national security disaster and it is almost purely about technology.
A reader has commented on news that the "US fed gov't dept email system [got] compromised," citing a bunch of news reports and links previously curated by us. Remember that it already happened last year and it was the fault of Microsoft. The US government even openly blasted Microsoft for it (when a Microsoft employee shifted the debate online to some blurb about "Xz" in Microsoft GitHub).
"Trump Broke the Federal Email System and Government Employees Got Blasted With Astonishingly Vulgar Messages," one news report said. "This is a security nightmare of a magnitude beyond anything I've heard of," said the leader, who has allowed us to reuse some material including links to leaks.
"Also available here," said the reader. To quote:
OPM employee here, we are not the bad guys HR (self.fednews) submitted 3 hours ago by Throwaway918284I'm a current employee at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). This is a throwaway account for obvious reasons. I'm posting this because people need to know what's going on at OPM.
I've been an OPM employee for nearly a decade and a Federal Employee for almost 20 years. I've never witnessed anything even remotely close to what's happening right now. In short, there's a hostile takeover of the federal civil service.
Let me say this in no uncertain terms - OPM has been compromised and taken over. The very backbone of American Government, the HR of all HR in the U.S. Government has been taken over by outside politicals. In just five days, they managed to push aside dozens of non-political, career civil servants who were there specifically to prevent the civil service from becoming the President's henchmen.
The current Acting Director, Charles (Chuck) Ezell is a low-level branch chief. He's the friendliest "yes man" you'll ever meet. He never says no. It s clear they pushed aside all the high-level non political civil servants who refused to do Donald Trump's bidding, until they found Chuck.
Under his name, they've sent numerous requests to all the agencies to collect information on gov't employees that they see as a threat to their agenda. Instructions say to send these lists to Amanda Scales. But Amanda is not actually an OPM employee, she works for Elon Musk. She wasn't even properly cleared by OPM Personnel Security.
Our CIO, Melvin Brown, (also a non political career public servant) 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. Such communications are normally left up to each agency.
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. It's been the one sending those various test message you've all seen. We think they're building a massive email list of all federal employees to generate mass RIF notices down the road.
The non-political civil servants here at OPM are watching helplessly as our government is being systematically dismantled bit by bit. Even the IGs are being fired to prevent them from investigating the numerous whistleblower complaints we've filed.
Please share this and tell the world that OPM is not the bad guy. We're just as helpless to stop this as the rest of our fellow public servants. Hopefully someone out there can help us, but it's looking pretty grim.
"This is obviously connected to the so-called "buyout offer" email sent civilian federal gov't employees," said the reader. "Judging from the text," the reader added, "Elon Musk and DOGE are involved. The language differs from what is normal in gov't communications; in fact many who received the messages initially dismissed them as spam."
"There are several issues here."
"(1) The buyout costs money. A budget is required but congress has not discussed the matter. Those who take the offer may end up in limbo in which they neither receive money nor get any way to return to work."
"(2) Government employees with invaluable skills may decide to take the buyout offer. For example air traffic control specialists may resign en masse."
"(3) Computer security issues. As seen above the server at OPM was installed without routine precautionary measures. It appears data is being moved or copied to some cloud server, again ignoring established security protocols. It is a "hack job" which circumvents safeguards."
"Computer specialists may resign, taking the buyout offer. Or those who disapprove of this kind of activity may be forced to leave."
"Employees of NOAA have received spam email. See Newsweek article below."
"We don't know how much sensitive data including formal workplace email addresses has been exposed to adversaries. China or Russia may already have email lists and such. If so, China may, in the hours before an invasion of Taiwan may send spam to confuse US government agencies. It might be a huge load of email designed to overburden servers, or worse, authentic-sounding messages assuring that all news of an imminent invasion is false and should be ignored."
"The curious story of Uncle Sam's HR dept," the reader said, is "a hastily set up email server, and fears of another cyber disaster" as covered by Thomas Claburn, Chris Williams, and Iain Thomson:
Two anonymous US government employees have sued Uncle Sam's HR department - the Office of Personnel Management - claiming the Trump administration's rapid roll out of a new federal email system broke the law.The pair's complaint [PDF], filed Monday in a Washington DC district court, claims an effort to establish a single email address through which the OPM can communicate directly with all civilian federal employees - some presume to facilitate firing them - violated the E-Government Act of 2002.
There's more an an aforementioned article dated yesterday (two days after the above). It's entitled "Trump Admin's Email System Compromised - What We Know" and it says:
The email system for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has reportedly been spammed with mass emails from outside the agency.
A mailing list for all NOAA workers, including those at the National Weather Service, was reportedly accessed by people outside the network, allowing them to email all 13,000 employees at the administration.
See also: Trump Broke the Federal Email System and Government Employees Got Blasted With Astonishingly Vulgar Messages | Exclusive-Musk aides lock government workers out of computer systems at US agency, sources say
"You [already] have links to articles in the most recent "Links" page," the reader said*. "Please do consider giving the issue more visibility." █
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* Citing Wired's "Elon Musk Lackeys Have Taken Over the Office of Personnel Management" and "Disemboweling the US Government".