Nextgov/FCW reports:

The Office of Personnel Management’s recent mass verification email to all civilian federal employees is raising concerns that the Trump administration circumvented longstanding procurement and cybersecurity laws to install an email system used to communicate widely with employees across the government.

On Friday, an email landing in employees’ inboxes from the address hr@opm.gov told recipients that it was a “test of a new distribution and response list” and asked them to reply “YES” to it. Many workers noted on a federal employee Reddit forum that they suspected it was a phishing email and reported it to their IT departments. A second test email went out on Saturday, according to email metadata obtained by Nextgov/FCW.

But just days before President Donald Trump’s inauguration, OPM did not have the capability to send a mass email of that scale, according to a person familiar with the matter. To send mass emails, the agency had used govDelivery, a cloud communications service provided by public sector IT company Granicus, a different person familiar said.

The govDelivery contract had restrictions on the volume of emails available to send without incurring added costs, and the agency would not have been able to reach 2.3 million people, the approximate number of all civilian federal employees, the second person added. Both people were granted anonymity to be candid about the sensitive nature of OPM’s email policies.

A lawsuit filed by unnamed federal employees in Washington, D.C. on Monday alleges that OPM violated the E-Government Act of 2002 by failing to conduct and publish required Privacy Impact Assessments before deploying the new email arrangement to collect the responses from government employees.

The plaintiffs also raise concerns about third-party involvement, linking the system to billionaire Elon Musk, a close ally of the new Trump administration that has vowed to overhaul government spending priorities via the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. [Continue reading…]