Last week, Popular Information broke down the "offer" that the Trump administration was making to millions of federal employees to induce th
Judd Legum at Popular Information:
Last week, Popular Information broke down the "offer" that the Trump administration was making to millions of federal employees to induce them to resign voluntarily. The Trump administration wanted federal employees to believe that if they agreed to resign effective September 30, they would receive their full pay until then and not have to work for the next eight months.
Elon Musk, who engineered the deal through the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), claimed on X that "[t]hose deciding to take the deferred resignation deal can do anything they want for the next eight months and are not required to work at all whatsoever." Many media outlets amplified this false narrative. The offer was widely reported as a "buyout," even though it did not include a lump sum payment or terminate the federal employees' work obligations.
The fine print of the deal, which at the time was detailed in an email and series of online FAQs, made it clear that employees could be required to work until their official resignation date. This means that federal employees could be agreeing to resign in exchange for nothing.
So far, about 20,000 federal workers, approximately 1% of the federal workforce, have accepted the offer, a Trump administration official told Axios. In a typical year, about 6% of the federal workforce turns over, so most of those accepting the deal may have been planning to quit or retire anyway. The administration was hoping to convince 5-10% of federal employees to resign.
On Monday, two days before the offer expires, OPM released a new memo and a contract providing more specificity about the terms of the deferred resignation agreement.
It is even worse than it initially appeared.
Federal employees agree to resign; the federal government agrees to do whatever it wants
The most important part of the contract released by OPM is Section 13. It states that the federal employees who accept the agreement waive their right to enforce the agreement in court or in any other forum.
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Agencies can rescind the deferred resignation at their sole discretion
The new OPM memo states that "[w]ere the government to backtrack on its commitments, an employee would be entitled to request a rescission of his or her resignation." It is unclear how this would happen, since the government is not committing to do anything in particular, other than exempt workers who agreed to deferred resignation from return-to-office policies.
The so-called “deferred resignation”/”buyout” of federal government employees is a sham tool used to drive out workers and be replaced with those fully aligned with the MAGA agenda, expertise be damned.
MTG Buyout Shitposting: The Legend of Bartel Runeaxe
Man, these last couple weeks have been a strain on my mind, every day I've had to watch Legends cards sporadically explode in random value because of some folks with too much time and money blindly buying everything out. I've pretty much put the set collecting on hold until things finally settle down. But this morning, I woke up to something amazing, something absolutely absurd that only happens once in a blue moon.
REMEMBER THIS DAY WELL, AS THE MOMENT WHERE A GARBAGE LEGENDARY WAS WORTH MORE THAN A MANA DRAIN
Damn, can't remember the last time I made a post like this that wasn't a reblog.
Musk et al. don't know or care about the damage they are doing
Don Moynihan at Can We Still Govern?:
Rayburn was talking about policymaking, but the point extends to more broadly to governing. Trashing government agencies is easy. Making them work is hard. DOGE, and the husk of the Office of Personnel Management that has become a DOGE zombie, are a good example.
Elon Musk has a reputation of an extraordinarily successful innovator. If you missed him devolving into a far-right conspiracy nut and hate-monger, it’s still possible to think: “well, he’s an amazing businessman—maybe he can fix government.”
The well of cautious optimism Musk enjoyed among smart people who knew a lot about government has pretty much run dry. We are moving from “maybe Elon will shake things up and reset the system” to “I really hope he does not break some deeply important government functions.”
Musk’s management style when it comes to downsizing has been to cut to the bone, and then hire back if he fired too many. This philosophy might make sense if you are running a social media company where its not a big deal if Twitter goes down for a couple of hours. It makes less sense where the a) failure of government systems has big and sometimes irrevocable costs, and b) it is not easy to replace expertise once you have eliminated it. On the latter point, many public jobs take time to develop knowledge of the policy domain, organizational practice and tasks. Those are not qualities that are easy to rebuild if you just spent a year training a new employee who has now been fired.
After 75,000 people accepted DOGE’s legally questionable deferred resignation offer, DOGE moved to engage in a mass firing of probationary employees, i.e. civil servants who have not yet received full job protections. We don’t have final numbers of those fried (you can find a tracker here), but probationary employees make up about 10% of the civilian workforce. Most of these are employees in their first year, but some were more experienced employees who became probationary when they switched positions.
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Don’t fire the guys taking care of the nukes
Let me note that I feel like this lesson should not be necessary. We should not need to spell this one out. One measure of the collapse of the Soviet Union was that they could no longer afford to keep staff to secure nuclear warheads. Why would the US voluntarily downgrade it’s own capacity to manage its nuclear arsenal? And yet, DOGE fired 1 in 5 federal staff that manage the nation’s nuclear stockpile.
Have you heard about the National Nuclear Security Administration before? Probably not. It’s one of those jobs that we hopefully never need to think about, because if we do that means something has gone badly wrong. But it’s also one of those jobs that someone needs to ensure is staffed appropriately to make sure something does not go badly wrong. As a citizen, its fine if you are not aware of NNSA, but bear in mind that when the right attacks wasteful bureaucracy, these sort of invisible agencies performing important tasks are some of what they are talking about.
Apparently DOGE does not know much about the NNSA either. To be fair, when you have zero experience of government, why should you? But if you have zero experience of government, you should also probably not be in the position of firing 300 of the guys who take care of the nukes. NNSA managers were given 200 characters—about the length of a social media post—to explain why the jobs of their employees mattered. The vast majority of these pleas were denied by Trump officials who simply did not understand the positions. CNN reported that the fired staffers included “staff who are on the ground at facilities where nuclear weapons are built. These staff oversee the contractors who build nuclear weapons, and they inspect these weapons.” Some staff oversees emergency response plans at nuclear weapons site, or were involved in preventing rogue nations from accessing nuclear materials. Dismissal emails said “your further employment would not be in the public interest."
After enough members of Congress got upset, the firings were rescinded.
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Don’t fire the guys collecting the money
Governments can’t function without revenue, so ensuring that the agency that collects taxes can do its job is pretty fundamental to maintaining state capacity. Under Biden, the IRS had received long-awaited and much needed funds that allowed it to rebuild after a period of sustained downsizing, and was becoming more effective.
The IRS represented a very simple test for the credibility of DOGE. Was it really interested in efficiency and state capacity? If so, you support the tax enforcement, the biggest return on investment in government, generating somewhere between $5-9 for every additional $1 spent on enforcement.
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Don’t lie to employees about their performance
Some of the employees fired were told it was due to poor performance. This would have required DOGE to look at their performance. Do you think these guys were conscientious enough to look carefully at individual employee performance? As a reminder, these are also the guys who fired the employees who took care of our nation’s nuclear stockpile.
HR officials at the NNSA resigned after they became frustrated at being forced to tell employees, falsely, that they were being fired for performance reasons. The absurdity of the situation was underlined when a Small Business Administration hire was told they were fired for poor performance, despite not yet having worked a single day in the agency. Other employees were fired despite receiving only excellent performance evaluations.
It is one thing to lie to the public about what bureaucrats do—and Musk has been doing plenty of that—but there is something deeply amoral about lying directly to individual human beings about their performance.
Don’t fire the guys keeping the planes in the sky
You might have noticed that since Trump became President a number of aviation fatalities have occurred. This happened after Musk pushed the head of the Federal Aviation Administration to resign, and Trump fired its safety advisory board. This likely had little direct effect on the crash at Reagan airport, but the crash highlighted staffing shortages, causing the Trump administration to tell FAA employees they could no longer apply for deferred resignation offer they had received days earlier. Safety first, it seemed.
FAA employees therefore had some reason to believe that they would be exempt from the purge of probationary employees, but this is not the case. Hundreds of FAA probationary employees were fired. While they were not air traffic controllers, many worked directly on safety, such as personnel working on radar, landing and navigational equipment.
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Don’t tell employees to return-to-office and fire them once they get there
Many employees took federal jobs on the assumption they did not have to work five days a week in an office. Then they were told they had to. The DOGE geniuses assumed they would be much more efficient if they could do their Microsoft Teams online meetings in a cubicle after a long commute, rather than from their home. So some of these employees upended their lives to satisfy the new return-to-office policies, and were promptly fired for doing so.
Don Moynihan wrote a solid piece on how DOGE is flagrantly mismanaging everything.
See Also:
The Guardian: ‘This is a coup’: Trump and Musk’s purge is cutting more than costs, say experts
Anyone who has read reports in the Associated Press, the New York Times, CBS News, CNN, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, NBC News, or Axios
Judd Legum at Popular Information:
Anyone who has read reports in the Associated Press, the New York Times, CBS News, CNN, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, NBC News, or Axios would be under the impression that the Trump administration has offered 2 million federal workers a "buyout" offer — eight months of pay in return for a voluntary resignation.
People who rely on television news were also told that federal workers were offered a buyout.
This is also the preferred narrative of the White House. In a statement, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that, under the policy, federal employees who "don’t want to work in the office and contribute to making America great again… are free to choose a different line of work, and the Trump Administration will provide a very generous payout of 8 months."
The problem with this narrative — and the media coverage — is that it is false.
A "buyout" is when an employer agrees to pay an employee a lump sum, often equivalent to the employee's salary for a particular length of time, in exchange for their voluntary resignation. After agreeing to the buyout offer, the employee receives the money, and their obligations to the employer end.
The Trump administration is proposing something very different.
Under the terms of the agreement, which is posted to the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) website, employees agree to resign effective September 30, 2025. Until that date, they remain employees of the federal government but are "exempted from all applicable in-person work requirements." This, of course, is only a valuable concession if an employee is still working. The agreement is called a "deferred resignation," not a "buyout."
The agreement states that, after accepting the deferred resignation offer, "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." Administrative leave allows an employee to collect their salary while not working. But, as the agreement makes clear, that is not guaranteed. There will "likely" be changes to an employee’s official duties, according to the agreement. But they are still an employee of the federal government and are obligated to continue to fulfill whatever responsibilities are assigned to them.
An OPM memo, dated January 28, 2025, states that employees who accept the deferred resignation agreement "should promptly have their duties reassigned or eliminated and be placed on paid administrative leave."
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The policy appears to be written by allies of Trump, including Elon Musk, who have little to no experience in the federal government. The subject line of the email, "A fork in the road," was the same subject line Musk used when he encouraged Twitter employees to resign. After mass resignations, Musk realized that a bunch of the people who left were performing essential functions and tried to rehire them. "There's no question that some of the people who were let go probably shouldn't have been let go," Musk said.
On X, Musk falsely described the deferred resignation agreement as a "severance offer."
[...]
Yesterday, the deferred resignation offer went out to 2 million federal employees, many of whom have decades of experience and are performing tasks that are essential to the functioning of their agencies. It was not targeted at individuals the Trump administration — or anyone else — believes are performing unnecessary or duplicative work. Federal employees who accept this deal do not get a buyout. They are simply gambling that their bosses place them on administrative leave. But there are no guarantees.
Federal employees could find that they agreed to resign in exchange for eight more months of working from home. Even that may not be a real benefit since many federal employees are members of unions that have contractual rights to work from home.
What the OPM under Trump offered to 2M+ federal workers was NOT “buyouts”, but a deferred resignation. It is also a tool to weaken civil service.
Rogers Communications has begun offering voluntary buyouts to employees as part of another round of cost-cutting efforts. The move comes as the company continues to adjust after its major acquisition of Shaw and looks to streamline operations across the business.
The buyouts are aimed at reducing its workforce without immediate layoffs, giving employees the option to leave with compensation packages. This approach has become more common among large telecom companies trying to manage expenses while reorganizing internally.
Rogers has been under pressure to find efficiencies and improve financial performance following the expensive merger. The company is working to balance debt, integration costs, and ongoing investments in its network and services.
It’s one of those quiet signals that the real impact of big mergers tends to show up later, not at the announcement.
The Hidden Power of Private Equity is rarely visible on storefronts or product labels. It operates through ownership. When a private equity firm acquires a company, it does not just change management. It changes incentives, capital structure, and time horizons. Debt becomes a tool. Cash flow becomes oxygen. Decisions accelerate. From hospitals in the United States to retailers in the United…
The $150 Million Axe: Analyzing the College Basketball Coaching Hot Seat
This financial and strategic analysis examines the volatile college basketball coaching carousel, focusing on the staggering $150 million in combined buyout money looming over the 2026 "hot seat" candidates. The summary profiles high-profile coaches at major Power Conference programs who are drastically underperforming relative to their massive, multi-year contracts. It explores how wealthy boosters are increasingly willing to pool funds to trigger these astronomical buyouts.
The analysis evaluates the factors accelerating the firing timeline. It discusses how the immediate gratification expected in the NIL and transfer portal era has eliminated the traditional four-year rebuilding grace period, forcing athletic directors to demand instant tournament success. The piece looks at the specific programs facing these decisions, weighing the financial ruin of a buyout against the apathy of a dwindling fanbase.
The piece concludes by predicting which programs will actually pull the trigger in March. It frames the modern coaching profession as a high-stakes financial gamble, where mediocrity has become the most expensive outcome for a university.
College basketball hot seat talk is louder than ever: buyouts, NIL pressure, and the coaches who could be bad March week from the exit door
