Compelling Mass Civil Servant Resignations Will Create Chaos

Twitter is not a model for government reform

Elon Musk’s role at Twitter represents a Rorschach test for how people think he will fare in restructuring government. For fans, he was able to cut the majority of the employees, and the site continued to run more or less as before. For detractors, the site became unusable, Twitter lost most of its value, and failed to deliver what Musk promised in terms of services and experience as it was converted into a vehicle to further his and Trump’s political goals.

Getty Images / Chris Unger

We should worry then about the severance offer — which is actually an invitation to make a “deferred resignation” — that was sent out to almost all federal employees. As Ken Klippenstein points out, the offer mirrors what Elon Musk offered to employees when he took over Twitter, all the way down to the metaphor of a “fork in the road.”

The Chief of Staff of the Office of Personnel Management is a former Musk employee, and several other Musk allies are in OPM or guiding its actions even though they don’t work there. Musk has promoted the offer on X.

Why federal employees might be tempted to leave

For the last week, federal employees have seen wave after wave of announcements that has made their job less secure and the prospect of staying with the federal government less appealing. One federal employee I spoke with compared it to going through the seven stages of grief.

In this context, a severance offer looks like a rare carrot after a lot of stick.

For feds who value remote work, and are told they must return to the office full time, this exit offer will be attractive. For those who suspect they will be fired in the future (such as those being put on administrative leave currently), this will be attractive. For those who did not sign up to be political appointees, but will be forced to do so, this will be attractive. For those worried they might be forcibly relocated, reassigned to duties inconsistent with their skills, or otherwise put in work conditions that compel them to resign, this will be attractive. For those who can expect increasingly worse material work conditions in terms of pay and benefits, this will be attractive. For those who cannot see themselves dealing with four years of being abused by their employer, engaging in illegal actions, or serving an administration that seeks to undermine the mission that attracted them to public service, this will be attractive.

In short, the offer of a buyout is attractive to many employees precisely because the Trump administration has made the prospect of staying so unattractive.

The draft resignation letter shared by OPM includes the phrase that “I am certain of my decision to resign and my choice to resign is fully voluntary”. On the other hand, employees are also told by OPM “we cannot give you full assurance regarding the certainty of your position or agency.” So, fully voluntary, if you ignore the gun being held to their head. Fully voluntary, when the alternative is a toxic workplace.

The offer is not as good as it sounds

Some details about the offer. To accept the offer, employees must respond by February 6. The resignation offer specifies: “If you resign under this program, you will retain all pay and benefits regardless of your daily workload and will be exempted from all applicable in-person work requirements until September 30, 2025.” An FAQ on the topics says: “Except in rare cases determined by your agency, you are not expected to work” and an OPM memo directs agencies to put those who accept the offer on administrative leave “unless the agency head determines that it is necessary for the employee to be actively engaged in transitioning job duties.”

The draft resignation letter employees would be committing to amounts to a lot less:

I understand my employing agency will likely make adjustments in response to my resignation including moving, eliminating, consolidating, reassigning my position and tasks, reducing my official duties, and/or placing me on paid administrative leave until my resignation date. I am committed to ensuring a smooth transition during my remaining time at my employing agency. Accordingly, I will assist my employing agency with completing reasonable and customary tasks and processes to facilitate my departure.

To be clear: employees are not being offered a buyout or severance package. They would be offering to resign in September, and until them enjoy an exemption from in-person work and an uncertain possibility of less work for the last few months of their job.

For media, it is important not to report this as a buyout and severance package, since this might mislead federal employees who have to make a big decision, and the public watching them do it. Don’t adopt misleading framing pushed by the White House!

Their office *may* decided to lighten their workload, or put them on paid administrative leave, but there is no guarantee of that. They remain federal employees. This makes it difficult for such employees to an “outside position” without formal permission, or to accept a job, since their federal employer could call them to complete a full work week at any time. They may be even be limited in their job searches because of ethics and conduct laws.

Can employees trust the offer?

Federal employees should be both confused and concerned. The email came from the new governmentwide email list allegedly constructed by Musk-aligned technologists at the Office of Personnel Management. The email server may not even be an official OPM server, and OPM is now being sued for the use of a potentially vulnerable email.

The OPM website confirms the contents of the email, reducing uncertainty as to whether the emails are some sort of phishing exercise. But if I were a federal employee interested in the offer, I would certainly be looking for more reassurances as to its credibility and legality.

In particular, we have not seen confirmation from the Office of Management and Budget that the offer will be honored. If this is Elon’s employees making a DOGE play, not coordinated with OMB or even other parts of OPM, the offer may be as credible as a random Musk tweet.

Trump has a reputation for reneging on payments to people who worked for him. Musk is also being sued by former executives and employees for failing to honor their Twitter compensation packages. These are not honorable men, bound by their word. Senator Tim Kaine made this point.

Surely though, if the government makes an offer, it is held to a higher standard than, uh, the President and the richest man in the world.

There are some reasons for skepticism. The actual buyout mechanism, Voluntary Separation Incentive Payments, is limited to $25,000, which for most employees would be much less than the value of approximately seven months pay. This is why the offer is structured as a “deferred resignation” but this is not a real legal category or mechanism for downsizing. A paid administrative leave is not a real severance, and leaves the power in the hands of the employer to revoke the offer at any point. Another seemingly basic problem with the use of administrative leave here, and its use to remove DEI employees, is that employees are not supposed to be put on such leave for more than 10 days per year. Administrative leave is intended to be a short term solution to problems, not a means to get people out of the office indefinitely, or to create no-show jobs.

Employers would be making a gentleman’s agreement, where they assume all of the risk, and that Trump and Musk are gentlemen.

Members of Congress might reasonably hold hearings to ask why core public tasks are not being performed while large numbers of skilled staff are on administrative leave. The current continuing resolution ends on March 14, and Congress could easily decide to impose immediate Reductions in Force to everyone that has indicated they will resign.

Inspectors General might reasonably query whether paying people to not work represents a waste of government resources. Federal supervisors dealing with a wave of exits will be within their rights to tell those who have signed resignation letters that they need to continue to contribute until the day they leave.

This is very bad for state capacity

Whatever the offer means for federal employees, it is unquestionably bad for you as a member of the public. To extend the Twitter-as-government metaphor: Musk’s X costs less than Twitter, but who actually thinks it is a better experience, apart from the far right and bot-enthusiasts? It no longer pretends to serve everyone, but instead has been converted into a vessel for Musk and his cronies to force feed their increasingly radical views to users. If you don’t like it, at least you can leave. Many have, including myself. But with government, we don’t really have that option. Lower administrative capacity affects us all.

As I’ve noted before, the federal government does not have an large number of employees in historical terms.

As an employer, the biggest HR problem for the government is in hiring people, not firing them. The people deciding that a downsizing is necessary are a) Trump, who deeply distrusts government, b) Trump supporters who oppose core missions of government, c) Silicon Valley types who have come to view government, especially its regulatory component, as the enemy. These are not people who care deeply about state capacity, and many have little real sense of what government does. They may believe they benefit from a government unable to perform core tasks, like delivering programs they oppose, or regulating their businesses. They are solving a problem that does not really exist, and in doing so, will create problems for the rest of us.

In the midst of massive uncertainty, the federal government is encouraging the employees with the best skills to exit public service. The Trump administration is making no meaningful effort to sort out high and low performers, or to manage the outflow of staff. What if the most knowledgable employees decide to go? What if the majority of some units decide they have had enough? Who performs the tasks that are left behind?

The White House claim that downsizing will save $100 billion is implausible, since the total payroll for the federal government is about $270 billion, a fraction of the $6.7 billion federal budget. Of course a loss of capacity also has costs, both financial (the federal government already struggles to manage its contract workforce) and in terms of service provision. The Government Accountability Office, which does look closely at government capacity issues, has been warning for decades about the “skills gap” creating high risks for public agencies.

The New York Times was admirably blunt about the effects on large-scale departures of federal employees:

Regular activities like traveling, renewing passports or filing for a tax return could be delayed or disrupted. The operation of national parks and museums, and the administration of benefits like Social Security, Medicare, veterans’ care and food stamps could also be affected. Regulators and inspectors for food, water, drugs and workplace safety could also leave the government. Among the government employees who could turn in their resignations are skilled researchers and doctors; environmental, nuclear and rocket scientists; and meteorologists at the National Weather Service. Depending on how the Trump administration defines “national security,” officers at law enforcement agencies like the F.B.I. and Drug Enforcement Administration may also resign.

If you are looking for a warning sign, the story of the US Department of Agriculture units that Trump relocated in his first term provides a better sense of the impact of the forced resignations: “Very little happened for the first two or three years after the relocation because there just wasn’t anybody there.” Even as the number of employees rebounded, the units lost so much expertise that they never recovered their former capacity.

The nearest historical equivalent we can find is during the Clinton administration, which used buyouts to encourage downsizing. Many did leave. Back then, $25,000 was a lot more money! In retrospect, however, the downsizing was not good for the federal government. It made the government more dependent on contractors, and reduced the capacity to build core aspects of capacity — such as building modern digital infrastructure — at a time when the government had the resources to do it. In historical terms, the budget deficits that downsizing helped close were not that large, but the skills deficit with the loss of talent had lasting effect.

A Government Accountability Office review of the experience emphasized the shortcomings with untargeted buyouts (I am very grateful to Don Kettl for pointing this out). The GAO said that buyouts would work better if agencies had planned for how to manage the transition, and tying buyouts “to eliminate positions in order to accomplish specific organizational objectives.” Of course, none of this is happening right now. The gaps in skills and knowledge within federal agencies are being decided by the employees who decide to leave, not an employer strategically managing their human capital resources.

Even if you think government needs restructuring, this is not the way to do it.

At Twitter, Musk conceded that some who left probably should have been retained, and pleaded with them to return. The federal government sometimes found itself spending more because it was “contracting out work formerly done by federal employees.” Indeed, the GAO found that four of the six agencies it examined had rehired former federal workers as contractors. The number of employees declined, but costs could still increase as a result. The USDA units that were relocated eventually returned to their prior size because they allowed remote work (which is now banned), and hired former employees back as contractors. Their budget is now higher than before.

As someone who is friends with some federal employees, I can certainly empathize with their temptation to leave, even as I caution them to read the fine print. As a taxpayer, I am furious that the federal government is taking such a half-assed approach to managing the people who provide the services we all rely on.