From yesterday’s decision by Judge Randolph Moss (D.D.C.) in Doe v. Office of Personnel Mgmt.:
In late January 2025, the Office of Personnel Management (“OPM”) began to test “‘a new capability allowing it to send important communications to ALL civilian federal employees from a single email address,'” and OPM subsequently began using this new system to send messages “to most if not all individuals with Government email addresses.” That new system uses the email address HR@opm.gov and is known as the “Government-Wide Email System” or “GWES.” This putative class action challenges the process by which OPM implemented this new system.
Plaintiffs are two federal executive branch employees and five other individuals who have “.gov” email addresses but are not executive branch employees. They contend that in the rush to adopt this new system, OPM at first entirely failed to comply with Section 208 of the E-Government Act of 2002, which requires the preparation of a Privacy Impact Assessment (“PIA”) before “initiating a new collection of [certain] information … using information technology,” and, then, when confronted with that omission, immediately threw together an inaccurate, insufficient, and unconsidered PIA in the hope of mooting the case. According to Plaintiffs, OPM’s failure to prepare a meaningful Privacy Impact Assessment has left vast amounts of private information, including the government email addresses of millions of individuals (which reveal their names and, at least in some cases, their employers) at risk of disclosure in the event that the GWES is hacked.
OPM, for its part, contends that it was not required to prepare a PIA because, on OPM’s reading, Section 208 does not apply to the collection of information about government employees, as opposed to about members of the public. And, even if that contention is wrong—either because it has misread the statute or because OPM inadvertently collected email addresses from individuals who do not work for the federal government but nonetheless use .gov or .mil email addresses—OPM, in any event, has now prepared a PIA. That is all that is required, on OPM’s telling, and the Court lacks the authority to examine the “substance and accuracy” of the PIA that the agency prepared….
Pending before the Court is Plaintiffs’ motion for a temporary restraining order (“TRO”), which asks the Court to enjoin OPM “from continuing to operate the Government-Wide Email System or any computer system connected to it prior to the completion and public release of a required legally sufficient Privacy Impact Assessment.” But Plaintiffs have failed to carry their burden of demonstrating (1) that they likely have standing to bring this action, and (2) that they are likely to suffer irreparable injury in the absence of emergency relief….
The court held that plaintiffs lacked standing to challenge the government’s actions:
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