Responses are meant to be voluntary under the privacy assessment associated with the system used to send the mass email out, although billionaire Elon Musk posted to X on Saturday that “failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”
Federal employees across different agencies have gotten varying directions on whether to respond to the email, sent from the same governmentwide email address set up to offer feds a controversial deferred resignation offer about a week into the new administration. The privacy assessment for the system is at the center of a lawsuit against the HR agency.
That privacy impact assessment for that email system states that all responses are "explicitly voluntary" in order to preserve employees' ability to consent to the information being collected. PIA’s are required by the E-Government Act of 2002 to analyze how agencies collect and protect personally identifiable information in federal systems.
That same assessment says that in order to mitigate the risk of feds not knowing that responses are voluntary, emails sent using the system should explicitly note that fact.
The weekend email didn’t state that responses were optional or include Musk’s threat of resignation. On Monday, the Office of Personnel Management told agencies that responses from feds are voluntary, the New York Times reported and a source familiar confirmed with Nextgov/FCW.
“We need everyone to be able to trust ..
Support the originator by clicking the read the rest link below.
