An unsent letter to Senator Tillis
There's a tradition of people writing "unsent letters." With this post I take part in it, kinda. Because I'm sending it to you and not the addressee, I cheat just a bit.
Last night, Bond Girl Bride and I had dinner with friends at a Mexican restaurant a dozen miles up the road from us. The place was packed and loud, and the food was good, though BGB was disappointed that they didn’t serve wine.
“I sent an email to Thom Tillis about his vote for Hegseth,” my friend across the table said as he forked his enchilada. “I got a really quick reply that said he wanted to support Trump because he got such a mandate.” He rolled his eyes. “Like, some mandate.”
I thought about the quick email reply and figured that his email was read not by a human being but a bot scanning for keywords. Electronic fingers grasped the form e-letter and shot out the reply. Thom Tillis or any of his fleshy staff will likely never see my friend’s note, though they might see a digest or graph of keyword frequencies or, if the technology in Tillis’ office is up to it, a “sentiment analysis” of the emails that had arrived.
It happens that I was then preparing my own communication to Senator Tillis to accompany a copy of a complaint sent to privacy@treasury.gov having to do with Elon Musk’s illegal access to Department of the Treasury IT systems, including ones with personal and sensitive information.1
My communication was dry business, and I, too, intended to send it via email.
The tradition of unsent letters
Years ago, I read David McCullough’s great biography of Harry S Truman (Bookshop; Alibris) and I vaguely recalled a mention of Truman’s salty, sometimes profane, and unleashed “unsent letters.”2 He’d write them in a fury, and his long-time secretary Rose Conway prepared them for sending. Conway apparently was also Truman’s guard—she was known, too, as “President Truman’s secret weapon.” When she spied a letter that was seasoned with too much spice and salt, as I recall, she slow walked its preparation and carefully staged its presentation for Truman’s signature, who, when he took a look at the text would pull it from the pile of letters, never to make it to an envelope or to the post box.3 Some have been published.
Besides Truman, Lincoln wrote unsent letters and many others have as well.
Maybe it was time to start writing unsent letters, I thought. And so I wrote Thom Tillis my bland letter for sending and another, unsent, where I could pull out some stops. It is a letter that utterly fails as an effective communication to a politician (too long, too complicated, too “literary” perhaps), but it serves to vent some spleen in these very, very spleeny times.
Oh … I decided to violate the “unsent” bit. I’m sending it to you.
Yes, it’s handwritten for good reason
Senator Jesse Helms (“The Rambo of the Geritol Generation,” as youngster colleague Senator Bob Dole called him) was said to pay special attention to hand-written letters. They took time to write, so their message was more lively and committed, he figured.
I wonder whether all of our letters to our representatives should go out in US post and be inked on paper with our pens. The choice on the receiving end would be either to bin them without responding or to let human eyes read them and use human fingers to grasp the form letter to send in reply.
The benefit would be the effort on the other end in Washington and a sense, perhaps hopeless, that a human might see, read, or even be influenced by words slowly and thoughtfully placed on a page.
First page of the “unsent letter” and readable transcript of the whole thing follows.
February 8, 2025
The Honorable Thom Tillis United States Senate Washington, DC 20510
Dear Senator Tillis,
I write to provide you a copy of a complaint I submitted to the US Department of Treasury. It is enclosed, and if you can assist in its request, I’d be obliged. I submitted it to the email address privacy@treasury.gov, and God knows if it can be acted upon or whether it was shuffled off to the department’s “junk mail” folder. With Mr. Musk’s DOGE forces controlling the US Treasury’s email “settings” anything can happen.
I doubt you hear much from people who live around Rougemont, a nearly invisible hamlet between Durham and Roxboro. In the first place, there are not that many of us to write or call, and most of the complaints and opinions are muttered over kitchen tables or in the cashier’s line at the Dollar General or the Rougemont Food Mart.
Lately, that grousing accompanies eye-rolls or whispered concerns about whether Social Security payments will actually come or, in rare cases, a muted concern about future prices for what’s soon sprouting in the fields.
The cashier’s line agrees that Washington has become a “shit-show,” to use unkind words uttered by one man to another. Mr. Musk’s youngsters, President Trump, and Congress are quickly becoming the stars of the show, with Mr. Musk the leading man, at least for now.
Good news for you is that you have had the best line in the show this week. And the most worrisome to me, at least, was your view of Mr. Musk’s illegal and unconstitutional takeover, blessed by the President—which, you admitted, “runs afoul of the Constitution” and then said
“nobody should bellyache about that.”
Well, people are quietly bellyaching. I’m bellyaching more loudly in this letter. Perhaps in an unformed way (because we’re not all lawyers here), we know that something that should be happening in Washington isn’t happening. And we know also that something is happening in Washington that should not be happening at all.
Just going along with what President Trump’s very, very rich friends have been doing at Treasury, USAID, and God knows where else implicates you in the destruction and even greater government waste that will follow.
Your willingness to sit on the couch, popcorn in hand, to watch the Elon Musk Show on Fox News risks muting yourself, Congress, and the Constitution you swore to uphold.
The people talking in Rougemont’s Dollar General know that Congress is noisy and for the most part slow and inefficient. Truth be told, we prefer it that way, especially when the volume goes down a bit. But ponderous and occasionally loud talk in Congress at least shows that someone is thinking about things that people care about. Such talk also lets us know that Senators like you at least know your job. The people in Rougemont also think that a run-amuck citizen and his youngsters, deputized by the President or not, won’t get far if Congress squeaks a threat to call “checks and balances” into play.
We sure wish you thought so, too!
As we wait in line at Dollar General, we’re waiting for someone in Congress to say,
“Wait a minute, Elon and President Trump. You can’t just do that. We the people won’t let your teenage minions do things willy-nilly.”
I urge you to say something other than lackadaisical blessings and stop Mr. Musk’s youngsters from running amuck, illegally, and without regard for large consequences. That would be best, of course, before the Secretary of the Treasury finds his department can’t cut a check because the computers only deliver error messages.
Elon Musk might count paralysis as DOGE “savings,” which the President wanted him to do. For others, many others, it counts as a shameful theft.
I didn’t vote for Elon.
Did you?
Sincerely,
[signed]
Got a comment?
Tags: politics, sarcasm, senate, house of representatives, congress, unsent letter, democracy, responsibility
Links, cited and not, some just interesting
Konnikova, Maria. “The Lost Art of the Unsent Angry Letter.” The New York Times, March 22, 2014, sec. Opinion. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/opinion/sunday/the-lost-art-of-the-unsent-angry-letter.html.
McCullough, David G. Truman. New York London Toronto [etc.]: Simon and Schuster, 1992.
And you can too! Here’s the text, slightly updated from the one provided by
here: “How Do We Stop the South African Billionaire?” Send it to privacy@treasury.gov.I am making a civil liberties complaint under the Privacy Act of 1974, 5 U.S.C. § 552a. It has been brought to my attention that Elon Musk and his associates, under the guise of a directive of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) (an IT office in the White House), have acquired access to Treasury Department Records in Systems of Records as defined in the Act. This access was revoked by a recent court order, though whether Mr. Musk's DOGE colleagues have complied is not clear. Moreover, the circumstances of the data the DOGE employees accessed and perhaps retained are still unknown. And so, as an individual covered by the Act, I believe that there may be records about me in these Treasury Department systems, and I am concerned for the following reasons:
1. Elon Musk is not an elected official.
2. Even if Musk were an elected official, the System of Records Notices (SORNs) governing the Treasury Department Privacy Act systems do not allow for disclosure to Musk and his associates per the Routine Uses.
3. Disclosure of personally identifiable information (PII) and sensitive personally identifiable information (SPII) to Musk and his associates would be an unauthorized disclosure and therefore breach of information.
The Treasury Department must (1) quickly investigate what Privacy Act records that Musk and his associates have unlawfully accessed, (2) reveal to the public what unauthorized disclosures were made, (3) stop further access, (4) force any files acquired by Musk and his associates to be returned and/or permanently destroyed, and (5) seek criminal penalties against Musk and his associates for violations of the Act.
Sincerely, [your contact information]
I searched through the index of McCullough’s book but failed to find the story. I went through a Truman stage in reading a while back, so I might have picked up the story somewhere else.
Some of the pulled letters probably should have made it to the addressee. To Joseph McCarthy, he wrote but never sent, “You are not even fit to have a hand in the operation of the Government of the United States. I am very sure that the people of Wisconsin are extremely sorry that they are represented by a person who has as little sense of responsibility as you have.” About those sentences, Maria Konnikova commented, “Truman may have ended up regretting lashing out, but at least he would have had the satisfaction of knowing that he’d told off one of the blights of the American political scene when so many kept quiet.”
Terrific letter. How bad can it get???