
Alex Brandon/AP Photo
Elon Musk arrives as President-elect Donald Trump speaks at a rally ahead of his second inauguration, January 19, 2025, in Washington.
A few days ago, a federal employee told me about an email they received from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the executive branch’s HR department, that looked suspiciously like a phishing scam, a high-priority flag within the government, especially since the recent hack of the Treasury Department. The email was deemed a test of a “new distribution and response list,” to see if messages could be sent to every federal employee, and if they could respond as well. Recipients were asked to reply “YES” to the email. Even though many offices were told about the email in advance, some still labeled it as a hack attempt.
Though there were claims that the new email capability would allow President Trump to communicate with all federal workers at once, it was unclear what the purpose of the technology was. Now we know: to set the stage for federal workers to receive an offer to quit.
In a separate email sent on Tuesday entitled “Fork in the Road,” most federal workers were effectively offered an eight-month severance package to leave their jobs, simply by sending hr@opm.gov a message with the word “Resign” in the subject line between now and February 6. Military personnel, postal workers, and national-security and immigration officials are not eligible.
The executive branch has no authority from Congress to offer a mass buyout to federal workers. In fact, the OPM website clearly states that the limit for incentive packages for voluntary resignations is $25,000, far less than eight months’ pay for the average federal worker. Some employees can’t even be offered that.
The way OPM purports to get around this is by defining this as “deferred resignation.” The resignation of the federal worker would be set at September 30, and they will retain full pay and benefits until then and be exempt from return-to-office requirements that are part of one of the Trump executive orders. (This is also a way to not unlawfully reduce salary outlays in federal appropriations for the current fiscal year.) “I understand 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,” reads the sample resignation letter. In this sense it is just a future setting of an end date of employment, though the strong implication is that those employees will have nothing to do for the next eight months.
Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) simply told federal workers, “Don’t be fooled,” on the Senate floor Tuesday night. “The president has no authority to make that offer,” Kaine said. “There’s no budget line item to pay people who are not showing up for work.” Kaine also highlighted the promises Trump made in his private-developer days to contractors that he repeatedly stiffed.
Ah, but the president didn’t make the offer, or at least not the elected one.
This was an Elon Musk operation, through and through. In fact, the “Fork in the Road” email had the same title as one that Elon Musk sent to Twitter when he took over there, informing workers to be “extremely hardcore” or take the resignation offer. The Twitter emails even included the same ask of workers to reply with their decision.
Sen. Tim Kaine: “The president has no authority to make that offer.”
Also like Elon’s Twitter experience, OPM enticed workers to take the offer by explaining how miserable it would be to stay in a government job. The Trump administration is requiring a return to the office, and stripping thousands of employees in policymaking roles of civil service protections. Because of expected divestitures of physical office space, many workers would have to relocate into new offices or maybe even new cities. Because of promised reductions in force, many workers who choose to stay could be furloughed anyway: “At this time, we cannot give you full assurance regarding the certainty of your position or agency,” the email reads. Moreover, there are statements about higher performance standards and an emphasis on being “loyal” and “trustworthy.”
If that’s what toiling in the bureaucracy is like, maybe you’d think about taking the big severance package, even if it sounds too good to be true. Which it is.
Musk’s associates have apparently taken over OPM, according to a rundown from Wired and a Reddit post by someone claiming to be an anonymous OPM staffer. Chief of staff Amanda Scales worked for Musk’s AI firm; a former Tesla and Boring Company engineer is a senior adviser. Memos written by OPM had metadata revealing the authors as Project 2025 authors and conservative think-tank veterans. The previous chief information officer was reassigned just a week into starting at the agency, apparently because he wouldn’t set up this distribution list to all federal employees. (According to the Redditor, that’s been set up on a separate server that looks like it’s coming from OPM.)
At least two other OPM officials with Musk ties were so young—one just graduated high school last year—that Wired chose not to name them. Musk visited OPM in person last Friday.
An apolitical agency now seeded with Musk and MAGA types, OPM is operating on the same principles as corporate America, eager to streamline operations with a mass culling of the workforce. Yet once again, this business drone mindset fails to grapple with the realities of government and where the real cost drivers are.
The White House estimates $100 billion in savings per year from this maneuver over time, a ridiculous figure considering that the entire salary base of the federal workforce is less than $300 billion annually. But take-up expectations are massively lower than that. Between 5 and 10 percent of the workforce could take the deferred resignation, officials estimate. Every year, between 5 and 7.5 percent of the workforce leave.
A slightly higher one-time reduction in the workforce, even if legal, would simply not create anything close to the desired savings from Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, because the biggest chunk of the federal budget is spent on benefit payments, not manpower.
An attractive-sounding offer combined with worsening working conditions could increase take-up. But the work of the federal government would still need to get done, and driving away a mass number of workers would significantly degrade agency effectiveness. In fact, as I wrote in a feature on DOGE, it would probably lead to hiring more expensive contractors, or a dramatic reduction in public-sector watchdogs ensuring the government doesn’t get ripped off. Either way, the budget would likely go up, not down.
Of course, budgetary impact is probably not the sole or even main reason for this action. Trump and Musk want a kept workforce, loyal to their policy aims, and in some ways a broken workforce that cannot enforce or oversee laws they don’t like. Trump’s lessons from his first term were to remove the barriers on his conduct, whether from inspectors general or the bureaucracy. This fits well with that initiative.
Beyond this, creating a toxic work environment to force people out could lead this largely unionized workforce to file an unfair labor practice, which would be a useful tool if U.S. labor law hadn’t been effectively nullified after a Democratic member of the NLRB was fired Tuesday.
That said, OPM is clearly aware that it cannot terrorize federal workers too heavily. In the email, OPM says that any changes to the workforce “will be pursued in accordance with applicable law, consistent with your agency’s policies, and to the extent permitted under relevant collective-bargaining agreements.” Already, some agencies have had to reject the White House’s return-to-office executive order, because work-from-home arrangements were put into union agreements.
So this is alternately questionably legal, potentially a bait and switch, dubiously effective as a budget-reducer, maybe even a budget-buster, and definitively harrowing for two million workers being subjected to a misery-inducing campaign for the sport of the world’s richest man.
Other than that, it’s perfect.