'Desperate pleas': Federal worker describes ways MAGA is making colleagues 'frustrated' and 'traumatized'

07 February

According to Reuters, more than 60,000 federal government workers are accepting a proposed buyout offer from the Trump Administration. The proposal is offering them full employment through September if they agree to resign now. But U.S. District Judge George O'Toole temporarily blocked the proposal, which many Trump critics allege is in violation of federal labor laws.

"Annie Porter," an employee of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), describes the stress federal workers are experiencing in an article published by Slate on February 7. That isn't her real name; she wrote the article on condition of anonymity and is highly critical of the Trump Administration, the buyout proposal, and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

"I'm a career civil servant at the federal government's Office of Personnel Management," Porter explains, "and I'm sorry. Normally, the only time anyone hears about our agency is when we declare snow days for the D.C. area, and prior to Zoom schooling, that made us very popular with local schoolchildren. But since President Donald Trump's inauguration, a new e-mail address has been set up at OPM and has been sending e-mails — after hours, on weekends, and sometimes more than once a day— that disparage the work of our fellow public servants and demand that they resign, or take mysterious 'buyout plans,' or prepare to be fired."

Porter continues, "These increasingly desperate pleas for civil servants — including us here at OPM — to quit are signed by the acting director of OPM, but mirror the directives (DOGE leader) Elon Musk used when dismantling Twitter, directives now being deployed in hopes of dismantling the federal government."

Porter emphasizes that OPM employees "are just as frustrated, confused, and traumatized as the rest of America."

"When I started my job at OPM," Porter notes, "I swore an oath to the Constitution — and to defend it against all enemies foreign and domestic, making it especially awful that the threat to our government is coming from inside my own office building…. Nobody I know at OPM has any idea what will happen next."

Porter adds, "More than 2 million federal employees are supposed to decide by Monday, February 10, whether to take the Trump Administration's 'deferred resignation' offer. Our union has already brought a lawsuit claiming that the severance package we've been offered is illegal. It promises us payment through September, but Congress has only funded the government through March, and I'm skeptical at the axe-wielders' enthusiasm to pay us not to work."

Read the full Slate article at this link (subscription required).

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