Federal Workforce Reeling Over Trump’s ‘buyout’ Offer

A federal workforce of some 2 million people is still reeling nearly after receiving a mass email that offered them a chance to preemptively resign ahead of additional and unspecified Trump administration efforts to shrink government.

With the terms of a stark but murky ultimatum unclear and likely subject to legal interpretations and challenges, upwards of hundreds of thousands of individual employees were struggling with what to do, increasingly uncertain about the stability of their jobs and their agencies.

“Chaos, mistrust, confusion,” said one employee at the Department of Justice who, like others, was granted anonymity to speak candidly about the situation without fear of retribution. “There’s also a deep suspicion, especially among people who think they may be on the chopping block, that this is the last lifeboat in town.”

Trump, who spent years decrying the “deep state,” has long wanted to reduce the government’s footprint. Frustrated over what he saw as overly lenient work-from-home policies nearly five years after the Covid-19 pandemic began, Trump has empowered Tesla CEO Elon Musk to help streamline government. But the vague order has nearly ground the massive bureaucracy to a halt, and has the potential to create the kind of crisis that might backfire politically.

“The blanket approach, which is pure Elon Musk, is going to have unintended consequences down the road,” said Elaine Kamarck, a government studies fellow at the Brookings Institution who oversaw President Bill Clinton’s initiative to reform government in the 1990s. “What if a third of the nation’s air traffic controllers take this buyout? Or all the CDC scientists leave for the private sector and then there’s a tuberculosis epidemic? That’s the risk with the way they’ve done it, sort of using a blowtorch for a very small issue.”

The email, sent Tuesday evening by the Office of Personnel Management, offered recipients the option to resign and be paid through September but offered no guarantees about future employment if they chose to stay. Although it was sent unsigned by the agency’s human resources department, many of the federal employees conferring about it over phone calls and group texts saw the fingerprints of Musk, who applied the same slashing approach after taking over Twitter.

In fact, the subject line was the exact same one he used in 2022 when giving staffers at Twitter a similar ultimatum to either become more “hardcore” or leave the company: “Fork in the road.”

The missive reflected Musk’s determination to take an axe to the federal bureaucracy, and offered an early indication that the unelected billionaire’s actual purview may extend beyond the newly formed “Department of Government Efficiency.” And just as he did when he arrived at Twitter, Musk is taking a go-fast-and-break-things approach in the second week of Donald Trump’s administration. He has added to the chaos across a federal workforce already reeling from legally questionable executive orders demanding to halt domestic and foreign aid.

“It’s unfathomable, the panic that it is causing throughout the government,” a second DOJ employee said. “And it is intentional. The new head of OMB [Russ Vought, who has not yet been confirmed by the Senate] said he wanted to traumatize the federal civil servants into leaving and it’s working.”

Tim Whitehouse, the executive director at the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a nonprofit that provides legal services to federal workers, said he had been fielding calls on the resignation request since it became public.

“The employees we are speaking to view this email as another tool to inflict pain and trauma on the federal government workforce,” Whitehouse said via email. “They understand this is not really a buyout, that it may be illegal, and that it does not guarantee that they will be able to stop work before September 30th. Because of the number of agencies and employees targeted, it shows the administration’s blow it all up approach to reducing the size of the federal workforce.”

Over the course of the day Wednesday, unions representing federal workers mobilized and implored members not to take the deal, denouncing it as a shady and slapdash attempt to scare workers into leaving on their own. Steve Lenkart, executive director of the National Federation of Federal Employees, said that most members “don’t trust this administration to hold up their end of the bargain, and others don’t see how this is legal.”

The American Federation of Government Employees emailed members a lengthy FAQ about the OPM resignation program, warning that it “should not [be taken] … at face value.”

When the email went out on Tuesday night, the distribution list was so large that it hit in waves. As the text messages started to fly, some people didn’t know at first what their panicked colleagues were up in arms about — until the OPM email showed up in their own in-boxes.

Inside the DOJ, the assistant attorney general for administration dashed off an all-staff email confirming the legitimacy of the ultimatum they’d just received from OPM. Managers being peppered with questions, however, had few answers.

That left recipients trying to make sense of media reports that the entire federal workforce had been offered “buyouts” and parsing the email’s language stating that those who opt to remain in their work are thereby committing to being part of “an improved federal workforce” even though, as the email made explicit, they could still be fired.

“We cannot give you full assurance regarding the certainty of your position or agency,” the email stated, offering only that workers would be “treated with dignity” in the event of termination.

The alternative, of course, was a “deferred resignation program” that would be available to opt into over the next week — simply by replying to the email with “Resign.” Doing so would allow employees “to retain all pay and benefits regardless of your daily workload and … be exempted from all applicable in-person work requirements until Sept. 30.”

“It really felt like we were being asked to resign, and, if we decided not to resign, like we were being asked to swear allegiance to a new form of government,” said the second DOJ employee. “It seems very clear that if we do not take that and resign, that our jobs are in serious jeopardy.”

A single parent, that employee was struggling with whether to preemptively abandon a decades-spanning career doing work they felt was important in order to ensure their ability to provide for their family.

“I am not a risk taker,” they said. “And every single option right now is a risk.”

A third DOJ employee said that an initial enthusiasm Tuesday night about being offered several months of severance, at least among those already planning to depart, gave way to rising suspicion on Wednesday and the grimmer realization that things were likely not what they seemed to be.

“Everyone else is like, ‘I don’t trust them,’” the third employee said. The email, they went on, “doesn’t seem real, there’s no guidance. It seems like it will be challenged. So it comes down to: Are you really willing to go to the casino and put your career on black?”

The OPM email’s language about offering workers a “dignified” option, the third employee continued, “makes it seem like a warning that there will be an undignified action coming for those who don’t take it.” And that it hit when agencies are already struggling to understand the impact of OMB’s freeze on federal assistance — since rescinded — deepened anxiety about the new administration and its apparent intent to execute the Project 2025 blueprint that called for a dramatically smaller federal workforce.

“It feels like there is enough chaos and there is an implied malice behind the chaos, and that makes it very difficult to plan your next step,” the third DOJ employee said.

All three DOJ employees expressed a shared concern that their agency — and, thus, their jobs — could be in even greater jeopardy than others across the executive branch because of Trump’s anger over its investigations into him.

That panic over the last 24 hours, of course, is not unique to DOJ.

“It was the batshit-craziest email I’ve ever read,” said an EPA employee. “These people have a history of shorting workers,” the EPA employee said. “There’s no way I’m sending ‘Resign’ to this jinky email address.”

A USAID employee boiled down the impact to a forced return to work and “a lot more fear and uncertainty” in the office, noting that “there’s a lot more interest in federal employee unions.”

“It’s not really a buyout, but it’s clearly part of this shock-and-awe approach to cajole and scare federal workers into thinking of quitting,” said one State Department official.

At FEMA, one employee said they and their colleagues were determined to remain in place to continue vital emergency response efforts. “Most people saw [the OPM email] as a scam,” they said. “Everybody’s very frustrated, very stressed — it’s hard not to be alarmist when you don’t know if your pension and retirement are at risk. But we’re just trying to take it day by day.”

One Labor Department employee expressed similar frustrations and doubt that the severance package would exceed the $25,000 annual severance pay limit under OPM regulations.

“I find it hard to believe they would pay me my full salary for 8 months to sit on my ass,” the Labor Department employee said. “The whole thing is pretty insulting. But also, no choice we have is good! Some [people] are like ‘is it better to have some control over my fate with a set end date?’ And others are like ‘I will die before I give them the satisfaction.’”

That DOL employee added that, for now, they aren’t planning on opting into the resignation program. “I’d rather be fired for resisting and making their lives hell,” they said.

And a number of federal employees expressed similar sentiments anonymously on Reddit and other public platforms.

“[B]efore that email went out, I was looking for any way to get out of this fresh hell,” one employee wrote on Reddit. “But now I am fired up to make these goons as frustrated as possible, [return to office] be damned.”

Another employee responded to that post in kind: “I was chill and laid back prior. Now I’m digging my heels in out of spite.”

Marcia Brown, Ben Lefebvre, Nick Niedzwiadek, Robbie Gramer, Kevin Bogardus and Robin Bravender contributed to this report.