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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

White House incentivizes federal workers to resign

President Donald Trump departs Washington National Cathedral on Jan. 21. (MUST CREDIT: Matt McClain/The Washington Post)  (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
By Emily Davies,Jeff Stein and Faiz Siddiqui washington post

The White House’s Office of Personnel Management sent an email blast Tuesday to federal employees offering them a way to resign with pay through Sept. 30, the most sweeping effort yet by the new Trump administration to shrink the ranks of the federal workforce.

The email instructed workers to reply to the message if they want to resign and take the offer, which expires Feb. 6. Most of the 2.3 million federal workers are eligible for the incentive, according to a White House Q&A, which landed as many employees already were facing return-to-office mandates and threats of layoffs.

“At this time, we cannot give you full assurance regarding the certainty of your position or agency, but should your position be eliminated you will be treated with dignity and will be afforded the protections in place for such positions,” reads the email, which was titled “Fork in the Road.”

The email blast comes less than a day after the White House announced a freeze on federal spending, which plunged the country into confusion and chaos, with food safety, crime prevention and housing assistance programs, among others, on the line. And it caps days of escalating anxiety over the personnel management office’s deployment of a “new distribution system” that sent “test” emails to groups of federal workers from a generic “hr” address.

A website details the offer for federal employees who did not receive it. The email sent to the federal workforce said employees who choose to resign will be exempt from the return-to-office requirements until Sept. 30. An Office of Personnel Management memo issued late Tuesday said employees who do resign should “promptly have their duties re-assigned or eliminated and be placed on paid administrative leave” until the end of September, but left room for agency directors to require employees to keep working for some time.

Trump’s focus on the federal workforce has become a source of fierce debate in Washington, with Democrats decrying blanket attempts at downsizing as a threat to democracy and Republicans casting them as necessary. The number of federal workers overall is largely flat - and down as a percentage of the nation’s total workforce, economists’ preferred metric - over the last four decades, according to federal data. The number of state and local government workers has risen, but not as a share of the national workforce.

“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,” Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal employee union, 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.”

Trump made shrinking and reshaping the federal government a centerpiece of his campaign, deriding the bureaucracy as corrupt, bloated and, in some cases, to blame for the suffering of his supporters. In his first eight days in office, he issued sweeping orders that slowed down parts of the federal government in a quest to assert broad control. The moves halted foreign aid, paused legal filings, and slashed all diversity, equity and inclusion programs and initiatives.

And on Tuesday, programs that fund schools, provide housing and ensure low-income people have access to health care were embroiled in chaos, as agencies attempted to make sense of the Trump administration’s Monday memo that ordered all federal spending paused. A federal judge later temporarily blocked the order.

The offer to resign in exchange for pay through September appeared to reflect the goals of the “Department of Government Efficiency” run by billionaire and Trump adviser Elon Musk. Musk previously called for “mass headcount reductions” of federal personnel, vowing that DOGE will work with U.S. agencies to “identify the minimum number of employees” necessary to perform essential functions. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed last year, Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who briefly served as the co-chair of DOGE, said they would aim to provide a “graceful exit” and incentives for early retirement to federal employees who leave.

Musk shared a post Tuesday on X that claimed that between 5 and 10 percent workers eligible for the order would take it. The Office of Personnel Management spokesperson said the administration did not have a target for the number of people officials hoped would leave.

“If, at the end of this exercise, we have achieved in converting public employed personnel to privately employed personnel working competitively in the private sector to increase our GDP and make things here in the United States … that’s probably a good thing,” said Rep. Andy Harris (R-Maryland), chairman of the House Freedom Caucus. “In the short run, will there be people in my district who may lose a federal job? Yes. But we’re in a region that is very economically vibrant, and there should be other opportunities for those individuals.”

The White House Q&A said certain employees will not qualify for the offer, including military personnel, members of the U.S. Postal Service, positions related to immigration enforcement and national security, and “any other positions specifically excluded by your employing agency.”

Highlighting Musk’s involvement, the subject line of the email - “Fork in the Road” - is the same as the one sent by Musk to Twitter employees in late 2022, asking them to commit to an “extremely hardcore” Twitter or resign. It ultimately led to hundreds of departures - forcing Twitter to rehire some of the expertise it had lost - as the company implemented a strict office culture and Musk laid out his vision for Twitter 2.0, one that departed from the company’s earlier mission as understood by its roughly 7,500 employees before his takeover. In all, Musk ended up reducing Twitter’s staff by about 80 percent, following a tumultuous takeover of the company he would later rename X.

“Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore,” Musk wrote in that midnight email to his staff in 2022. “This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.”

Musk erected an art piece outside Tesla’s headquarters in Texas of a giant fork at a crossroads, a reference to what he saw as a battle for the future of civilization.

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Jacob Bogage, Dan Diamond and Natalie Allison contributed to this report.