Posted on 10/03/2026 4:18:20 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
When the new ‘department of government efficiency’ sent young techies to disrupt federal agencies, not everyone complied. Here’s what happened when one worker fought to protect immigrant data
In the early hours of Saturday 22 February 2025 the following email landed in the inboxes of the entire US federal workforce:
From: HR hr@opm.gov
Sent: Saturday, February 22, 2025
Subject: What did you do last week?
Importance: High
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. EST.
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. “One hundred thousand people is a big-sized town,” said Kathleen. “In any big-sized town, you have some crazy people. I could easily see someone writing, ‘This weekend...’”
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
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Why does "The Grauniad" think we care about what some loser POS named Kathleen Walters, who can't keep Trump's tax returns confidential, says about her incompetent loser job?
Needs more wrecking bell.
has anyone been arrested yet inside the beltway for any of it!??
...then it was all a waste of time. the microsecond trump leaves office it will go right back to what it was because EVERYONE will know you can rip off millions and NOTHING will happen to you in DC...
I believe Trump’s partial tax returns were released by a contractor, not a Federal employee.
“I believe Trump’s partial tax returns were released by a contractor, not a Federal employee.”
well, in THAT case, it’s OK ...
My schadenfreude cup runneth over
“Elon is my prophet”
That’s just a case of bright, but naive, person meeting a genius.
The Mrs. and I hosted a graduate school candidate for an interview the next day at the department my wife was studying in. It was weird, because I, and especially my wife, are pretty smart. By the next morning, I wanted to enroll in some kind of remedial logic and detailed information course.
That candidate turned down the invitation to enroll.
Who knows why?
Well the original poster seemed to infer that it was the Federal worker’s fault that the tax returns were released. Seems to me that the Fed workers were doing their jobs correctly but it was a private contractor working for the government who broke the law.
Young techies to disrupt federal agencies.
To late they like chaos easier to funnel money that way.
I thought the focus of DOGE was DEI hires and policies. Getting rid of DEI hires and cancelling DEI and CMM related contracts. Seemed like that was the focus at NOAA and the NWS.
DOGE and those who love constitutional freedom have hardly begun to eliminate the unconstitutional portion of the federal gov’t.
I'm not asking anyone to post an answer to that here. In fact, please don't.
but ...
If you're working for a paycheck ... or even keeping house ... and you can't come up with approximately 5 accomplishments per week ...
WTF are you doing?
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