In the early hours of Saturday 22 February 2025 the following email landed in the inboxes of the entire US federal workforce: Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager. Please do not send any classified information, links, or attachments. Deadline is this Monday at 11:59 p.m.
When she noticed the email that Saturday night, Kathleen Walters already had far too much going on in her life. Number one was figuring out if the lump in her breast that her doctor had just detected was a tumour. Half of her known blood relatives had died of cancer, and she was now 52: the lump needed understanding.
Her work life was harder to dramatise with a list. For a start, the specifics of her job at any given moment, as she would have been the first to point out, couldn’t legally be described to others. She was the chief privacy officer at the Internal Revenue Service.
She ran a staff of 650 people tasked with preventing any of the 100,000 IRS employees from losing or leaking or even so much as peeking at, unless they had the authority to peek, any of the 266m tax returns they were just then processing from the previous year. I could easily see someone writing, ‘This weekend I audited Beyoncé.’” Whoever had sent this email asking her to list five things she’d done at work was now demanding that all these people inside the IRS share information that, in many cases, should never be shared. She responded quickly, and vaguely, with five things she had done the previous week, all the while feeling sure no one would ever read what she wrote.
Her phone was already exploding with questions from her subordinates – a few of whom were saying that their replies were bouncing back with a “mailbox is full” notice. Now she had to sit and think about how to minimise the damage that might be caused by 100,000 IRS employees thinking that they’d lose their jobs if they didn’t supply some detailed answer about what they’d done during their work week. A meaningful percentage risked being tossed in jail if they described what they did in an email.
It was a crime for an IRS employee even to acknowledge that some specific person had or had not filed a tax return. The email came as a surprise, but then the IRS was suddenly full of surprises. Nine days earlier, on 13 February, a Thursday, the first Doge person turned up in the lobby, unannounced, and security called Traci DiMartini, who ran the IRS’s human capital department.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
