HHS warns that responses to Elon Musk’s email may ‘be read by malign foreign actors’

The Department of Health and Human Services sent agency employees an email Monday afternoon warning them that any responses to Elon Musk’s request that they share their accomplishments from the past week might “be read by malign foreign actors.”

Four HHS employees shared the email with NBC News.

“On Saturday, you received an email from OPM entitled ‘What did you do last week,’” the email, which came from HHS.News@HHS.Gov, began. “The directive stated employees were to submit five bullets detailing their accomplishments in the past week. In discussions with OPM Officials yesterday and today OPM has now rescinded that mandatory requirement.”

“There is no HHS expectation that HHS employees respond to OPM and there is no impact to your employment with the agency if you choose not to respond,” the email continued. “That said, if you choose to respond, here are the guidelines you should follow.”

The email said employees who wish to respond should keep “a high level of generality and describe your work in a manner to protect sensitive data.”

“Assume that what you write will be read by malign foreign actors and tailor your response accordingly,” the email read.

An HHS spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday.

The email comes after days of confusion following an email that was blasted out across the federal government on Saturday by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. It followed a Musk tweet that said “all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week. Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”

In the hours after the OPM email landed in inboxes, a number of department heads, including FBI Director Kash Patel, said employees should “pause any responses to the email.” Employees of the State Department, the National Institutes of Health, the Defense Department, the National Security Agency and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence were also told not to respond to the email.

On Monday, NBC News reported that the responses to the email are expected to be fed into an artificial intelligence system to determine whether those jobs are necessary or not, according to three sources with knowledge of the system.

Speaking with reporters in the Oval Office on Monday, Trump said he “thought it was great” when asked about the government-wide email.

“We have people that don’t show up to work and nobody even knows if they work for the government so by asking the question ‘tell us what you did this week,’ what he’s doing is saying ‘are you actually working,'” Trump said.

“There was a lot of genius in sending it,” Trump added. “If people don’t respond, it’s very possible that there is no such person or they’re not working.”

For years, the U.S. has struggled to secure its internal systems from nation-state hackers seeking to spy on its doings. China-linked hackers have proven particularly adept at breaking into sensitive systems, having accessed the email account of the U.S. ambassador to China, while Russian hackers in 2021 breached email accounts belonging to the head of the Department of Homeland Security and various other officials in the first Trump administration.

Last year, the Library of Congress said hackers broke into its communications systems and were able to read their emails.

In December, U.S. officials urged all Americans to use encrypted apps after hackers connected to China were found to have breached U.S. telecommunications infrastructure.