CNN
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The once-obscure Office of Personnel Management, essentially the human resources department of the federal government, is now ground zero for Elon Musk and President Donald Trump’s efforts to slash bureaucracy and deconstruct vast portions of the administrative state.
Current and former OPM employees describe an agency that’s been taken over by a shadow operation of political appointees affiliated with Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
Isolated on a secure floor inside the agency’s Washington headquarters, DOGE personnel, many with deep ties to Musk and his companies, are now effectively in charge of OPM, issuing government-wide directives that are seen as blueprints for carrying out the administration’s vision to shrink the government.
That has left career employees sidelined, feeling blindsided and scapegoated.
“The federal workers at OPM don’t even know what’s going on, and we are getting blamed for allowing Elon Musk and DOGE into OPM,” a recently departed OPM official told CNN. “It’s very well known within the agency that it’s the shadow OPM, not the career employees pushing the buttons.”
DOGE team members arrived at OPM on Inauguration Day.
Soon after, sources said career staff and executives lost administrative authority over various systems and platforms related to or tied directly to personnel data for millions of federal workers.
“It kept some people from doing the jobs they were hired for,” a current OPM employee told CNN. That person said information technology specialists at OPM now spend their workday answering DOGE and political appointees’ questions on how systems work “instead of being allowed to do their jobs.”
DOGE team members have secluded themselves on the fifth-floor director’s suite, which sources now say is guarded by tight security with strict limits on who can enter.
The former employee who spoke to CNN described a security guard seated outside of the director’s office who keeps a printed paper with headshots of career employees who are approved to enter.
Two current OPM employees who, like others, agreed to speak with CNN under the condition their names not be published over fear of retribution for speaking to the media, said they’ve seen an increased security presence at the agency since the start of the Trump administration, and especially when Musk is in the building.
OPM did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.
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Career employees at OPM who used to communicate policy and guidelines to federal agencies now watch powerlessly as OPM fires off directives to the more than 2 million federal workers.
OPM previously did not send mass emails to the federal workforce — it only communicated guidance to agencies and their leadership.
But now OPM communicates directly with all federal workers from HR@OPM.gov, an email address set up by DOGE that career staffers are unable to access, sources told CNN.
The first major news delivered to the entire federal workforce from HR@OPM.gov was the January 28 announcement of government’s deferred resignation program. The email, known among government employees as “The Fork in the Road,” offered workers the chance to remain on the payroll through September if they agreed to resign.
Shernice Mundell, an OPM employee who was terminated in February due to her probationary status, told CNN she first heard about that email on the news. Two other OPM sources said the human resources staff at the agency didn’t know anything about “The Fork in the Road” until they started getting inquiries from federal workers.
Mundell was one of thousands of probationary employees fired last month under a directive from the Trump administration. A federal judge in California last week found those mass firings were likely unlawful, saying OPM “does not have any authority whatsoever, under any statute in the history of the universe” to hire or fire any employees other than its own.
More recently, federal workers received an email from HR@OPM.gov asking them to list five things they accomplished at work in the past week. But two OPM sources said the emails are not coming from actual agency employees.
Rob Shriver, who served as OPM’s acting director under the Biden administration, told CNN he’s been in constant touch with employees at OPM, who he said are pained by the loss of trust by the federal workforce.
“The entire organization has been corrupted by DOGE,” Shriver said. “It’s a terrible spot for the OPM career folks to be in. They are not able to shape any of the messaging that’s coming out. In talking to several of them, they’re not being consulted, or they’re not being asked if they think this is something that should be done, if it’s legal. They have absolutely no ability to weigh in with any of their expertise.”
Shriver now leads a program defending government employees in the face of the Trump administration’s downsizing of the workforce.
OPM has become DOGE’s primary messenger for directing federal agencies on how to shrink their workforces, which agency offices to shutter and which contracts to cancel.
It’s also keeping a tight hold on even the more mundane information coming out of the agency.
“Making a simple change on the OPM website to put out information on a weather alert, like all Washington facilities are closed, we used to be able to make that change,” one of the current OPM employees said. “Now it has to go through the fifth floor before that change can even be made.”
Gaining quick access and control to the data and computer systems of OPM was fundamental to DOGE’s ability to infiltrate key Washington nerve centers. Political appointees and advisers connected to Musk or major tech firms now sit in top leadership positions across agencies that comprise the federal government’s personnel, technology, property and acquisition operations.
Sources said OPM is viewed as a testing ground for DOGE’s government-wide tactics — a sentiment that was laid out by top DOGE leaders during their first meeting with career staff the day after the inauguration.
“OPM is looked at as a model. The goal is to reduce the footprint of the federal workforce,” Anthony Armstrong, a senior adviser at OPM and a banker who helped Musk acquire Twitter, told employees, according to the recently departed employee who was in the meeting.
In another meeting 10 days later, Brian Bjelde, a longtime engineer at Musk’s SpaceX and now another top adviser at OPM, told career employees there would be massive restructuring across the federal workforce, according to that same person, who was also in that meeting.
Bjelde instructed agency leaders to draft a plan for a 70% cut in their respective workforces. “OPM is leading all agencies doing this exercise,” Bjelde said, according to the person in the meeting.
One OPM source told CNN the proposed cuts were so deep that some of the managers asked to draft plans had to include their own jobs in the cuts.
And now, just one month later, OPM has instructed all agencies to draw up similar plans for large-scale layoffs, issuing a joint memo with the Office of Management and Budget mapping out how agency leaders should conduct large-scale terminations.
The Social Security Administration said it aims to cut about 7,000 jobs, roughly 12% of its staff. Managers at the General Services Administration have been asked to put together proposals for 50% reductions in the organization, according to a source with knowledge of the matter.
Current and recently departed OPM employees describe the agency’s workforce as just as demoralized and confused as many other government workers.
As for Mundell, she is updating her resume and has filed for unemployment in DC. She said because she was abruptly shut out of the government IT system when she was fired, she never got to download the documents needed to file for unemployment, including her last six paystubs.
“I’ve never been fired from a job before,” said Mundell. “My faith is saying God is going to get me through it. Some days I’m optimistic, some days I’m not.”
