'Duty to leave': Federal employee who quit during Trump’s first term tells workers to bail

04 February

Federal employees have been offered a potentially illegal option: resign by Thursday, and collect pay until September. One former government worker who quit his job during President Donald Trump's administration recently offered his advice: Take the buyout.

Experts warn that the “Fork in the Road” proposal is illegal because it would involve spending money before Congress has approved it. Workers would no longer have to complete their tasks, but they would continue to collect a salary.

“Here’s my advice to civil servants: Take the fork,” Chuck Park, a former diplomat, wrote in the Washington Post Tuesday.

Park left his job as a State Department diplomat in 2019 over the Trump administration’s policies, recalling that his "breaking points" were "scenes of crying children at the border and a horrific episode of violence against immigrants in El Paso, Texas.

"Now the nation seems poised to repeat such cruelties,” he wrote. “It isn’t noble to resist from within. It’s not public service to hide and bide your time within the vast machinery, ticking down the days until the next presidential election or the day your pension kicks in. If you can’t execute this administration’s policies (the lawful ones, that is), then it is your duty to leave.”

Park argued that government employees face a real likelihood that they will have to carry out the Trump agenda, writing that while workers could try to "convince [bosses] that vaccines and disaster relief are good, while mass deportation and failed states are bad," that bosses are free to disagree that rogue employees will ultimately have to "get with the agenda or leave." He went on to note that quitting to work for a more worthy cause could be "the most powerful resistance,” adding that "on the outside, you can speak your mind, get things done faster and get paid your worth.”

“So don’t be intimidated by the fork in the road,” he writes. “You have a duty to yourself and to your conscience as much as to anybody else. Know your values, and the moment you’re asked to violate them, hit ‘reply’ to that email.”

Click here to read Park's full essay in the Washington Post (subscription required).

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