'Unfathomable panic': Federal workforce rocked by 'chaos and confusion' following OPM buyout offer

30 January

On Tuesday night, January 28 — eight nights into Donald Trump's second presidency — around 2 million federal workers received a controversial e-mail from the U.S Office of Personnel Management (OPM). The e-mail offered them payment through September if they quit, and Politico's Eli Stokols describes the offer as "a chance to preemptively resign ahead of additional and unspecified Trump Administration efforts to shrink government."

In an article published on January 30, Stokols describes the anxiety that has been rocking the United States' federal government workforce since that e-mail was sent out.

"With the terms of a stark but murky ultimatum unclear and likely subject to legal interpretations and challenges," Stokols explains, "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."

The January 28 e-mail, according to the American Prospect, has Elon Musk's stamp all over it.

President Trump tapped Musk to lead an advisory board being billed as the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The e-mail's subject heading was "Fork in the Road," which, ABC News reports, was also the subject heading of e-mails Musk sent to employees of X, formerly Twitter, after he acquired the social media platform in 2022.

Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institution is warning that a major disruption of the United States' federal workforce could create major problems.

Kamarck told Politico, "The blanket approach, which is pure Elon Musk, is going to have unintended consequences down the road. 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."

An employee of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is highly critical of the role that Russell Vought — the Project 2025 contributor who Trump has picked to head the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) — is having on Trump's plans to downsize the federal workforce.

That DOJ employee told Politico, "It's unfathomable, the panic that it is causing throughout the government. And it is intentional…. (Vought) said he wanted to traumatize the federal civil servants into leaving, and it's working."

Tim Whitehouse, executive director at the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, is questioning the legality of the January 28 e-mail.

Whitehouse told Politico, "The employees we are speaking to view this e-mail as another tool to inflict pain and trauma on the federal government workforce. 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 (Trump) Administration's blow-it-all-up approach to reducing the size of the federal workforce."

Tweeting his article on January 30, Stokol noted, "One federal worker told me they reported the OPM email as phishing because 'it was such a joke.' Others said the mass resignation offer caused 'chaos, mistrust and confusion.'"

Read Eli Stokols' full article for Politico at this link.

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