Would Donald Trump lie to you?Mother Jones illustration; Getty
Federal workers comprise less than one percent of the US population, but are responsible for facilitating programs that help all 330-plus million Americans have access to health care, veterans’ services, safe transportation, clean water, nutritional assistance, and so much more.
On Tuesday evening, a memo titled “Fork in the Road,” from a mysterious Office of Personnel Management (OPM) email address, began offering nearly all federal government workers—excluding members of the military, postal workers, immigration officers, and national security personnel—the option to leave their nonpartisan, bureaucratic posts. All they have to do is send the word “resign” in the body of a reply to hr@opm.gov by February 6.
In exchange for leaving of their own volition, the email claims federal workers taking the offer will be able to “retain all pay and benefits” and be “exempted from all applicable in-person work requirements” until eight months from now, on September 30. (Last week, President Donald Trump issued a memorandum requiring all federal workers to return to in-person work “as soon as practicable.”)
Workers who choose to resign could be placed on leave or see their duties reduced through September, the email says. Resigning would also, theoretically, save federal workers the anxiety of a looming layoff down the road, when Trump is expected to make good on his promise to decimate the current federal workforce. “The majority of federal agencies are likely to be downsized,” the Tuesday email, reviewed by Mother Jones, says. “At this time, we cannot give you full assurance regarding the certainty of your position.”
To federal employees who received it, the email “implied that anyone who didn’t resign must fall in line with the administration or their jobs could be at risk,” says one federal employee of the Department of Commerce. To the email’s authors, it’s an attempt to allow federal workers who don’t want to contribute to “making America great again” the ability to “choose a different line of work” and receive “a very generous payout of eight months,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told NBC.
Union leaders, who represent about one in four federal workers, and labor lawyers are skeptical about the email’s terms and legality. Meanwhile, government employees are oscillating between shock and awe: Many expressed a genuine concern for their ability to continue serving Americans through their roles. Others are amused by the absurdity of suggesting millions of workers step aside via individual, one-word email replies. Mother Jones heard from roughly a dozen federal workers and union representatives for this story; most were granted anonymity to avoid workplace retaliation.
“It seemed like a scare tactic, like so much of what they’ve done so far,” said a USDA employee.
A civilian Army employee said that the email’s “composition and the ‘reply Resign’ line made it hard to take seriously.”
Some Treasury workers represented by the National Treasury Employees Union even thought the email was a phishing attempt or spam.
“They did not believe it was really coming from the federal government,” says Doreen Greenwald, the union’s national president.
On Tuesday afternoon, a couple of hours before some USDA employees received the offer for paid resignation, their supervisors called them to convene about a different email. This one was incredibly vague, and a tad eerie: “Watch Your Emails,” it said. “Starting tonight, OPM will be sending out an important federal workforce announcement.”
USDA leaders seemed surprised by that OPM correspondence and the offer to resign that followed. “It’s clear [that] middle management and agency leadership were not aware this was coming,” said the USDA worker, adding that colleagues have set up means of communicating outside work channels to strategize with and support one another. “We have no idea whether OPM can legally authorize the terms, accept resignations, or even legally email us like this.”
For starters, it’s unclear whether the federal government is even able to place huge swaths of government workers on leave for several months, as the OPM email says it will. Current statute indicates that agencies can put employees on leave for “a period of not more than a total of 10 work days.”
Additionally, the maximum amount agencies that are downsizing or reorganizing can offer federal workers in exchange for resignation is $25,000, according to an OPM webpage about the Voluntary Separation Incentive Payment Authority, which stipulates voluntary separation payments for agencies that are “downsizing or restructuring.” The sum an average federal worker makes in eight months is at least double that.
“My initial interpretation was that it’s a scam,” said one foreign service officer. “The memo was so lacking in details, it couldn’t possibly offer what it claimed to. Nowhere does it actually say what will happen to anyone who replies.”
The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) isn’t confident that employees who accept the offer will get anything. “There is no guarantee that the claims in the Program will be honored by the Government,” the union, which represents the rights of some 800,000 government employees, said in a statement Wednesday. “Employees who opt-in to the Program will be at the mercy of the administrators of the Program, whose claims contain inconsistencies and lack stated legal underpinning.”
Federal workers aren’t the only ones at risk of negative impacts resulting from mass government resignations: Anyone who requires safe medication, clean air, healthy produce, natural disaster aid, or anything else the federal government touches—so, all of us—could suffer, too.