No one knows how many federal workers will take up the offer of hefty buyouts made Tuesday in an email from the Trump administration.
Frankly, it’s anyone’s guess where the buyout offers will stand in the next few days. President Donald Trump has already created chaos and confusion with his freeze on federal funding, now rescinded after a federal judge halted it. Pushback against the buyouts is already emerging.
But whatever the fallout, keep this in mind: These buyout offers, we suspect, are about more than shrinking government, or getting rid of people who are not “on board” with ending remote work for federal employees, or even just implementing the “disruption” that Trump has promised to bring to Washington.
The generous buyouts are in line with Trump’s desire to transform — wreck, we would call it — America’s federal government by turning it into what would amount to a Chicago-style patronage army, with workers who have few qualifications or experience but are loyal to Trump’s policies and agenda.
Go back to 2020, when Trump signed his “Schedule F” executive order to reclassify thousands of career civil servants, making it easier to fire them and replace them with political appointees. Trump lost the election, so the order was never implemented.
But now, if implemented under a second Trump administration, Schedule F would be just as problematic, if not more so, as appointing a former talk show host with a checkered past as secretary of Defense and an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist with zero expertise in science as secretary of Health and Human Services.
On Jan. 20, Trump signed an executive order that would essentially revive Schedule F, creating a new employment classification for thousands of career civil servants. At least one lawsuit has already been filed over the order.
For every person who takes the buyout, the Trump administration could switch course and say, “Hey, we need that person after all,” then replace them with a new hire who supports Trump’s policies but has little or no experience for the job. Mission accomplished, in Trump’s view, without any messy firings.
As Rudy Mehrbani, an advisory council member for the Center for Effective Government at the University of Chicago, wrote in a Sun-Times op-ed last year on Schedule F, “One proponent admitted its intent was ‘to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will.'”
Pushback to ‘fork in the road’ email
On Tuesday, the Trump administration sent an email offering buyouts of eight months’ pay to some 2 million civilian federal employees, excluding workers in immigration and national security-related positions and people working for the U.S. Postal Service. Workers have until Feb. 6 to accept or reject the offer.
Pushback is coming already, with federal employee unions already urging workers not to take the offer.
“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,” American Federation of Government Employees President Everett Kelley said in a statement, urging federal workers not to make a hasty decision.
Some federal workers reportedly even questioned whether the email was real.
The subject line, “Fork in the road,” surely didn’t bolster the email’s credibility. That’s the same subject line Elon Musk, head of Trump’s specially created Department of Government Efficiency, used in 2022 when he sent an email to Twitter employees warning them they needed to commit to an “extremely hardcore” work schedule or be fired.
Musk did fire some 80% of Twitter’s engineers and others, then had to hire many of them back in order to keep the place functioning. As for what’s befallen the social media company under Musk — well, it’s a shell of its former self. X is now worth billions less than when Musk first bought it as Twitter, has millions fewer users, and is a haven for misinformation and right-wing rhetoric.
All of which shows us that Musk is the last person who ought to be trusted, even by Trump, to properly “streamline” government.
Unless streamlining and efficiency aren’t the real goals.
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