Do you work for the federal government? From home? And are you less-than-excited about the prospect of getting up two hours earlier than the job technically requires so you can dress up in the drabbest of drab, charcoal-grey business attire for an otiose commute to the physical bureaucracy, where you’ll spend the next eight hours doing exactly the same thing you would’ve done at home (i.e., perpetuating people’s Kafka nightmares), just peevishly, only to waste another two hours reverse-commuting, missing time with your family, pushing dinner back to 8:00 PM and bedtime to midnight, thereby guaranteeing a miserable tomorrow?
If that’s you, you’re in luck. Donald Trump (inspired by Elon Musk’s pretensions to “efficiency”) is offering “generous” buyouts to “all” federal employees starting mid-week. According to senior Trump administration officials who spoke to the media, the offers are available to all government employees save those working for the Pentagon and the Post Office. Those with ICE and NatSec roles are also excepted from the program, euphemistically called “deferred resignation.”
The push, billed as “an unprecedented move to shrink the US government at breakneck speed,” as the AP put it Wednesday, came packaged with a thinly-veiled threat: Federal employees will be subjected to “enhanced standards of suitability and conduct” going forward — executive branch personnel excluded, one can only assume. OMB also reiterated that government payrolls will be cut, and likely significantly, over the course of Trump’s second term.
To call this ill-advised would be… well, almost surely accurate, but also a bit premature. It’s usually only possible to call something a bad idea with the benefit of hindsight, and if you take Joni Ernst’s claim that just 6% of federal employees work full-time, in-person at face value, and if you assume that a fair number of the 94% who allegedly don’t are relying on COVID as an excuse to stay home, then sure, it’s time for an ultimatum.
But Ernst’s calculations have been disputed. According to OMB itself, more than half of federal employees work entirely in-person, and just one in 10 are all-remote.
I won’t endeavor to reconcile that discrepancy, but common sense dictates that Ernst’s tally overstates the WFM “problem” as it relates to federal employees. It’s beggars belief that fewer than one in 10 government workers can be classified as full-time, in-person.
In any event, the administration says the buyout offers are designed to ensure “all federal workers are on board with the new administration’s plan to have federal employees in office and adhering to higher standards.” That’s according to another official who spoke anonymously to the media. Opponents say it’s little more than an effort to bully people and extract de facto fealty pledges.
I won’t argue that the federal government’s a model of efficiency, and it’d be ludicrous to suggest each and every person employed by the government’s indispensable. However, government employees — there are 2.4 million of them when you strip out the military and the Post Office — do a lot of things.
The figures above, from Pew, give you some idea about who’s jeopardized by Trump’s Musk-inspired efficiency push, and more to the point, about what sorts of services might suffer as a result of a large-scale, unorganized downsizing push.
Union boss Everett Kelley — he’s president of the largest federal employee union, which represents the interests of 800,000 federal workers — painted a foreboding picture.
“Purging the federal government of dedicated career federal employees will have vast, unintended consequences that will cause chaos for the Americans who depend on a functioning federal government,” Kelley said in a Tuesday statement. “Between the flurry of anti-worker executive orders and policies, it is clear that the Trump administration’s goal is to turn the federal government into a toxic environment where workers cannot stay even if they want to.”
As Pew noted earlier this month, the federal government employs nearly 2% of the entire civilian workforce, all in. Even if you exclude the military and the Post Office, the government counts as America’s “single largest employer, with even more workers than Walmart, Amazon or McDonald’s,” Pew remarked.
The key point is that Trump almost surely hasn’t given the buyout initiative — nor “DOGE” more generally –as much thought as a plan this potentially consequential deserves and needs in order to insure against what the AP warned could be “widespread disruptions throughout society.”
Trump, reports indicate, expects around 10% of federal workers to accept his offer of eight months’ pay and benefits to quit now. If you’re in the firing line, you have until next Thursday to let The White House know your decision. Enrolling in the program’s easy: Federal employees need only reply to Trump’s email with the word “Resign.”
I wonder where the money comes for the buyout?
Is this why the IG’s were fired?
Does not congress have to allocate money for a buyout?
Seems like more power than any man can handle has been wielded.
No new funds for buyout needed. The money is there to pay them, with regular paychecks already committed, through September. It’s a deferred resignation… workers stop working now, keep getting paychecks. Only the work they did stops. Those who stay pick up the slack, or the slack piles up, breaking things. Move fast and break things, said some billionaire, I think.
And, of course, those paychecks will keep coming for those who Reply Yes, I’m certain. Just like Elon when he pulled this move on the Twitter employees, DJT would never renege and stop paying the losers who left.
Come October, all the people who took the early payout will be back saying that they never intended to give up their jobs and that HR never explained to them what was at stake, and that the federal employee handbook doesn’t mention anything about giving up a government job by typing “resign” on a cell phone.
You should definitely start replying to every annoying email you get with just the word “Resign”.
“I love your report, but I’m really made about your take on Gaza or Russia or something, blah blah blah threatening to cancel my subscription!”
Reply
Resign
Send
I would expect many would come back in October as contractors with similar pay but no benefits. That is what you often see in the real world.
That has been the experience of many I know. The reduction in force works for about 6 months but then whatever program or project needed help was addressed via consultant contracts or rehires. And during that 6 months many positions were consolidated among the underutilized talented staff who ended up with more pay, responsibility, and more interesting work. Programs considered non essential were scraped.Never looked back with any regrets. Could happen here.
Living in a large military area I can tell you the civil service that supports the military has absolutely been included in this buyout offer. The people who, ya know, build and maintain the Atlantic Fleet, suddenly walking off the job with 8 months pay; is going to have national security impacts.
The legality of this move is also in question, at this point in time the only legally allowed period for federal civilian administrative leave is 10 days. This decision seems to be a response to the court challenges of the Schedule F executive order. If federal workers were to take this “deal” but it is not legally supportable, they would be effectively voiding their federal workforce protections. Which is probably the objective given who’s negotiating the “deal”.
It’s been 9 days and we’ve seen Medicaid go offline for the first time in 60 years, military contracts get haulted for an indefinite period of time, and now the federal workforce get a legally dubious buyout offer. If this were a movie about how to f*ck up a government, it would be considered too unrealistic to watch. Isn’t it GREAT?!
Musk did this with X. He is still bleeding money. It wasn’t a direct business profit improvement process, it was a political tool development process to use as leverage across business landscapes, huge return on investment – for sure, pure opinion LOL
Are there similarities to the end game of The Great Resignation? Letting my dystopia mind wonder, scary!
I have no doubt there are areas of the government staffed by a number of people close to retirement, what happens when they all decide to leave? Also, can you imagine being one of the people who needs the job, what kind of workplace are you left with? Interesting to see what happens.