OPM's five-bullet email ultimatum sent the IRS privacy chief into damage control

The email went to everyone at once, and it assumed every job could be described in five bullets. At the IRS, many could not. Walters's office existed to stop any of the agency's 100,000 employees from losing, leaking or even peeking at a return without authority ^[3]. It was a crime for an IRS employee even to acknowledge whether a specific person had or had not filed a tax return ^[5]. Her staff of 650 came to about one person for every 154 employees ^[1].

Walters described the risk in terms of scale. "One hundred thousand people is a big-sized town," she said. "In any big-sized town, you have some crazy people. I could easily see someone writing, 'This weekend I audited Beyoncé.'" ^[4] The Guardian reports that her concern was staff who believed a detailed answer was the price of keeping their jobs ^[7]. Her phone was already filling with questions from subordinates, and some said their replies were bouncing back with a "mailbox is full" notice ^[6]. "People don't understand what the IRS does," Walters said ^[14].

A single central instruction is fast and gets every answer in the same format. What it loses is the local knowledge of which jobs cannot legally be described in an email. Walters answered in general terms. She replied quickly and vaguely, sure that no one would ever read what she wrote ^[2]. That protected taxpayers. It also meant the exercise got the least information from the people whose work carries the most legal weight. In my view, a census that is thinnest where the work is most sensitive cannot tell anyone who to keep.

The same bypass shows up in how DOGE arrived. On 13 February, nine days before the email, Gavin Kliger turned up unannounced in the IRS lobby, and security called Traci DiMartini, who ran the agency's human capital department ^[8]. Treasury, which always cleared new political appointees, had no record of him ^[9]. Tim Curry at the Office of Personnel Management had no idea what was going on ^[10]. Kliger carried badges for a large number of government buildings and a backpack holding government phones and at least four laptops. He demanded an IRS phone, a laptop, an email address and access to the agency's computer systems ^[11]. He told DiMartini he had come to root out fraud ^[12]. The Guardian's account holds that the IRS's weakness was its technology, that its ethical infrastructure was sound, and that fraud was not likely one of its problems ^[13].

In both episodes the first burden fell on the offices whose job is to check access and disclosure. The excerpt does not include a savings figure or a count of departures, so it cannot show that the damage outran the savings. The cost fell first on control staff. The choice an operator makes this quarter is whether a workforce review goes through the people who know which answers are illegal. The consequence arrives next quarter, when the review either rests on usable replies or on answers like Walters's, written by someone who assumed no one would read them ^[2].