Donald Trump offers US federal workers buyouts to resign
By: Dani Anguiano, Chris Michael (the Guardian)
Oh, look, Elon Musk is turning into Al Gore. Can we expect Musk to start talking about PAYGO, GOCO, lock boxes, and inconvenient truths?
Trump has turned the clock back to the Clinton administration. Bill Clinton reinvented government, shrunk the Federal workforce by 250,000 employees (using buyouts and RIFs). Clinton temporarily froze spending for review. Clinton ran purges of internal oversight functions. Bill Clinton adopted a tough stance on illegal immigration and crime. Bill Clinton cozied up to Vladimir Putin. Bill Clinton gifted the Federal government to the financial sector.
We've seen this movie before. Trump is only following in Bill Clinton's footsteps. Trump is just not as slick as Clinton.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
The Trump administration has offered buyouts to almost all of the roughly 3 million people who work for the US government if they leave their jobs by 6 February, as the White House attempts to gut the civil service.
The US office of personnel management (OPM), the government's human resources agency, sent an email to the entire federal workforce on Tuesday evening with four directives that it says Trump is mandating. They included a full-time return to the office for most employees.
The email said that the federal workforce would be subjected to "enhanced standards of suitability and conduct", aiming to retain only employees who were "reliable, loyal, trustworthy". It warned that most agencies would be downsized.
"If you choose not to continue in your current role in the federal workforce, we thank you for your service to your country and you will be provided with a dignified, fair departure from the federal government utilizing a deferred resignation program," the email reads. It offered workers more than seven months' salary, and asked them to reply with the word "Resign".
The email had the same subject line - "Fork in the road" - as one sent by Elon Musk to employees at Twitter in 2022 when he bought the social media platform.
Musk has been tasked by Trump with cutting as much as a quarter of all government spending. He does not work at the office of personnel management but a former employee of Musk's, Amanda Scales, was recently made its chief of staff.
The unprecedented move appeared to defy rules that protect government employees from political interference and to immediately kneecap all federal government agencies.
Unions representing federal workers immediately condemned the offer.
The Virginia senator Tim Kaine called it a trick. "If you accept that offer and resign, he'll stiff you," Kaine said, referencing Trump's well-documented history of attempting to avoid paying contractors.
"He doesn't have any authority to do this," Kaine said. "Do not be fooled by this guy."
Trump has pledged to radically remake government, including significantly shrinking the federal workforce and cutting trillions of dollars of spending - an agenda his administration is attempting to implement at breakneck speed.
Since Friday, the US president has fired a dozen independent federal government watchdogs, as well as Gwynne Wilcox, a senior official at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), who described her dismissal as "unprecedented and illegal". On Monday, the administration moved to freeze all grants and loans disbursed by the federal government - an effort that a judge blocked on Tuesday.
The American Federation of Government Employees denounced the latest move. The union's president, Everett Kelley, argued the offer was an effort to pressure workers who are not considered loyal to the new administration to leave their jobs - which could cause upheaval in federal programs.
"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 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."
The mass departure of federal workers - from frontline healthcare workers in the veterans affairs department to the officials charged with processing loans for homebuyers or small businesses - could have sweeping consequences for Americans.
The New York Times reported that it could seriously disrupt American life on a vast scale, including most benefits traditionally termed "welfare" - including Medicare, social security and food stamps - as well as travel, tax returns, the normal function of national parks and national museums, passport renewals, medical research, other forms of science, the inspectors and regulators who make sure that food, water and pharmaceutical drugs are safe to consume, and even the accurate functioning of the National Weather Service.
The US government is roughly the nation's 15th-largest workforce with more than 3 million employees. Project 2025, the conservative manifesto that has guided much of Trump's policy goals, calls for mass firings of federal workers and suggests replacing many of them with political appointees.
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Slick Willie Trump and his trusted sidekick, Lockbox Musk, is running REGO 2.0 and will soon declare the Era of Big Government is Over. Just wait and see. What is really queer about this deja vu is that Republicans are cheering Slick Willie and Democrats are pissed as hell.
Wonder if Slick Willie Trump enjoys a good cigar?
Generally speaking, buyouts will reduce staff but typically it is the desirable employees with marketable skills who leave. Those who are coasting along doing the minimum to stay under the radar are less likely to leave.
The smart way to do this is based on merit and need. Remove jobs that are unnecessary and try to recruit the good employees to take on other positions while encouraging the bad employees to depart.
But that takes work.
That's where politics interfered with Clinton's reinvention and search for efficiency in the bureaucracy. Clinton expanded and utilized the pool of Senior Executive Service employees to implement his priorities for efficiency and to provide management for programs created without Congressional input or oversight. Becoming a SES employee is typically more influenced by politics than merit.
Democracy prunes the tree. Authoritarianism cuts the tree down. This administration will go a step further to remove the roots and pretend to plant another seed that will take decades to produce fruit.
One of the few times I’ve agreed with you here.
Right now they are throwing the baby out with the bath water. I’ve got numerous friends caught in the middle of this who work for the Fed. All agree a good swamp cleaning is required. None think this is the best way to do it.
The only experience I have had with federal government is through active duty. The military did something similar to this years ago by allowing military members to retire at 16 years instead of 20, but not receive a pension.
I think what it did was allow those that realized they had no path to being promoted, not because of performance but because of the availability of open billets when the promotion cycle opened just were not there. For instance, my rate was Operations Specialist. Two of the three times I was elibible for E7, there were no open billets, so essentially, I was not going to be promoted anyway. Thankfully, the third time there were 7 or 8 open places and I was able to earn one of those.
With this, however, we will see those that do not know how to follow instructions by returning to their original offices and became too comfy working from home, some remotely in other states.
No one ever said that arrangement would be permanent and those people should have been ready to move at any time.
I believe those that thrive at their positions and want to continue the career will stay and the ones that want to cry about doing their jobs from their home bases are the ones that will volunteer to go. This will allow later for the hiring of those that absolutely know where they will be working from.
One would hope that is how it works.
A good friend who works for one of those three letter agencies is one of the good ones but because he is one of the good ones he can write his own ticket in the private sector and make more money if he wants. He was not even considering that before this plan hit. Now he is.
People like him leave, it’s likely a net brain drain.
Good to know you realize DEI should not be a factor.
Spend less time presuming based on a faulty stereotype and more time reading what people actually write.
Sad it’s come to this, but it has to be easier for the federal government to fire people. Federal workers should be at at will employees.
Firing Federal employees is not that difficult. The middle managers are required to document deficiencies in performance and show an effort to correct those deficiencies. That's a six month process that can be rather tedious and requires keeping a lot of paper records. But it's not overwhelming or difficult to do.
BTW, if a Federal employee is fired for cause then they lose their Federal retirement benefits. So, there is a huge incentive for the employee to fight being fired. It's pretty much guaranteed that the manager who does the firing is going to be sued. The Federal government won't do a goddammed thing to back up the manager. It's not unusual for the firing manager to be hurt more than the employee that was fired.
does not correspond to this
That's a six month process
It's possible to fire them immediately for any reason. But your ass is going to be sued and you are going to lose. The government won't back you up during any civil case to recover damages. You're on the hook for your own lawyers and to pay any damages. And to add more joy for doing your job as a manager, the government will garnish your wages to pay damages to whoever you fired.
That six month period ain't there to protect the employee. If you want to fuck over the middle managers then guess who's gonna be in charge. That's like tying the hands of Border Patrol and then complaining about illegal immigration. Whose the damned idiot who thinks that's gonna work out?