Over the weekend, Elon Musk polled his X (formerly Twitter) followers on whether federal employees should be required to submit a weekly report of their accomplishments. With over 70% voting ‘yes,’ Musk followed through, and the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) sent out emails requesting all federal employees to submit their task lists by Monday, 11:59 PM ET.
Musk even warned that failure to respond “will be taken as a resignation.” This move, however, has triggered massive online resistance, with social media users on Reddit, TikTok, Threads, and Bluesky flooding the OPM’s email with spam—including the entire script of the infamous Bee Movie, a long-running internet joke.
This tactic has been used before. In Missouri, activists spammed an anti-trans “snitch form” until it was shut down. Similar methods were employed against Texas and Utah government tracking systems targeting LGBTQ+ communities. Even in 2020, K-pop fans overwhelmed a Dallas police tip line with fan videos to counteract surveillance on protestors.
While it remains unclear how effective this spam campaign will be, Musk’s DOGE team—which operates the email system—could filter out non-.gov addresses or simply shut down the inbox if overwhelmed. Security concerns also loom large, given that the OPM was hacked in 2015, compromising sensitive data of 21.5 million people.
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