Portside

This flood of spam comments and fake responses to the DOGE hiring site is one of many similar campaigns aiming to overwhelm hotlines and emails. 

A Missouri government tip site for submitting complaints about gender-affirming care was taken down after people overwhelmed it with rambling anecdotes and the “Bee Movie” script.

Similar protest emails have been sent to the Office of Personnel Management, or OPM, which is trying to get reports of noncompliance with their anti-trans efforts. Sending messages to defendingwomen@opm.gov, people are attempting to use a flood of complaints to prevent snitching from targeting federal workers upholding trans inclusion.

After the Trump administration warned federal employees of “adverse consequences” for not reporting colleagues resisting orders to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs, citizens began submitting false reports to the special email account: DEIAtruth@opm.gov. Here’s one example: “A man named Donald Trump is doing affirmative action for billionaires and oligarchs against the mandate to stop hiring minority groups.”

Another campaign has been emailing the DOGE Caucus and suggesting that they cut the military budget or SpaceX contracts instead. (DOGE itself has no publicly available emails, but people can contact this pro-DOGE group at: doge@mail.house.gov)

The tactic of spamming websites, emails and hotlines tries to render them inoperable, or at least inconvenient, to those trying to use them to report or repress resistance. These kind of tactics have been used numerous times, often to great success. In 2021, Reddit users supported striking Kellogg’s workers by crashing the scab hiring website. In 2022, a teen coded a program to help other teens spam a tip line for reporting critical race theory being taught in schools. In 2024, Utah and Indiana’s snitch lines on bathroom accessibility was overwhelmed with hoax reports.

Humor and rebellious defiance play an important role in these bleak times. The fake applications aren’t just about jamming up the system. They’re returning a sense of agency to people, affirming their humanity and unleashing a bit of much-needed laughter. 

Around 2000, when the student-led resistance group Otpor! sought to oust the Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic, they used a series of humorous pranks to build momentum and break through fear of the regime’s repression. For example, they would paste a photo of Milosevic’s face on a metal barrel, place it in the street and wallop it with a baseball bat. When people came running at the noise, they’d hand them the bat and say, “Sick of the dictator? Bang on the can.” That would bring more people, which would make more noise, which would build more interest in the movement to ultimately oust him. Otpor! grew from 12 students to 70,000 in two years and succeeded in kicking Milosevic out of power. 

Humorous resistance tactics empower people through their mischievous, rebellious defiance of unjust laws and policies. Whether they succeed in crashing the hotline or not, they achieve the secondary goal of catalyzing people’s spirit of resistance. This was true even for a satirical post whose rumors outstripped its reality. The satirical post claimed that the ICE Hotline had been taken down after 90 percent of the calls were reporting Elon Musk. Even if untrue, it was uplifting to imagine. And who knows? Maybe this piece of speculative fiction will actualize into reality. As Snopes reported: “The rumor was presumably in reference to a phone number (1-866-DHS-2-ICE) for people ‘to report suspicious activity’ that’s listed on the header of the agency’s website.”

In the early days of Trump’s second presidency, when paralyzing fear and despair gripped many in a state of shocked immobilization, the effort to flood snitch lines broke through that reaction. It helped people tap into their defiance, laugh and unleash the sense of rebellious mischief that energizes a movement. 

Where ordinary protests in the streets sometimes feel like they’re either falling on deaf ears or preaching to the choir, creative tactics like these are fostering a sense of solidarity and connection as the social posts circulate. They’re breaking people out of passivity with a relatively risk-free action that has a practical strategic purpose. And they’re lifting our spirits, too.

Even greater strength can be found in turning a small, plucky act of rebellion into a mass movement to hamper this administration at every turn. Dispersed, widespread acts of small or large scale “gumming up” of an opponent’s ability to operate has a long history, one that predates the Internet. The World War II “Simple Sabotage Manual” — once classified and now available online at Gutenberg.org — has been circulating widely in recent months. It includes tactics for hindering a hostile occupation regime, including stalling meetings with long speeches, bringing up irrelevant points and haggling over small details. Other tactics include “misunderstanding” orders, delaying as long as possible and sending supplies to the wrong place. In Nazi-occupied Denmark, such strategies were so effective that despite being controlled by the Nazis for several years, the Danish shipyards never completed building a single warship for Germany. 

In the United States today, there’s a growing call for federal workers, civil servants, politicians, citizens and residents to resist wherever they can — even if the action can only stall the administration for a little while. We saw that in the U.S. Treasury’s acting deputy secretary, who resigned after trying to prevent the DOGE team’s demand for server access. USAID security chiefs who tried to prevent Elon Musk from accessing sensitive information were placed on leave, but not before alerting the public to what was happening. The Federal Election Commission Chairwoman Ellen Weintraub refused to resign when Trump fired her, saying “Received a letter from POTUS today purporting to remove me as Commissioner & Chair. There’s a legal way to replace FEC commissioners — this isn’t it.” USDA Inspector General Phyllis Fong also refused to resign her post and forced the administration to send security officers to escort her from the building.

School districts are refusing to let ICE enter or to enforce anti-trans policies. Cities are declaring themselves sanctuary cities for migrants and LGBTQ+ persons. Some businesses are upholding DEIA policies in the face of federal threats of prosecution. States are in open defiance to the federal government over the executive orders on DEIA, climate and trans issues. 

Stalling, slowing, hampering, hindering actions can have a cumulative effect that adds up and wears down the opponent. Not all campaigns succeed in full, but each throws a little more grit into the machinery of hate and destruction. 

It adds up. It slows them down. It gives the movement time to organize. There are countless ways to participate in these calls-to-action. Who will apply to DOGE next?

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Author/Activist Rivera Sun has written numerous books and novels, including "The Dandelion Insurrection" and the award-winning Ari Ara Series. She is the editor of Nonviolence News and the Program Coordinator for Campaign Nonviolence. Her articles are syndicated by Peace Voice and published in hundreds of journals nationwide. Rivera Sun serves on the board of Backbone Campaign and the advisory board of World BEYOND War.