President Donald Trump’s offer to pay federal workers through September if they resign caught lawmakers of both parties off guard — and peeved Republicans and Democrats for very different reasons.
It all started when an email landed in federal workers’ inboxes on Tuesday presenting them with a deferred resignation offer that would let them receive pay through Sept. 30 without having to work at all, “except in rare cases.” To accept, employees need only email hr@opm.gov with the word “Resign” in the subject line.
Workers are then welcome to “take the vacation you always wanted, or just watch movies and chill, while receiving your full government pay and benefits,” per a post by the Department of Government Efficiency. Republican senators said they wouldn’t have made such a “generous” offer if they were in Trump’s position.
“I can’t say stunned, but I was kind of surprised by how generous the offer was,” Sen. Kevin Cramer told NOTUS. “He’s way more generous than I would have been. I’d have said, ‘You have til tomorrow to get to work or lose your job.’ Donald Trump is so much kinder than me.”
“I could have lived with the president just saying, ‘Look, you’ve got to come back to work physically and if you don’t want to do that, you need to go find a new line of work,’” Sen. John Kennedy said.
“He gave them a chance. I was surprised he gave them a chance,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville said.
Sen. Josh Hawley said federal employees working from home should count themselves lucky not to be just fired immediately.
“President could have just fired them,” Hawley told NOTUS. “He could say, ‘Listen, report to work, or we’re firing you.’ He’s actually being kind of generous. Let’s get people back to work in person, and if they don’t want to do that, then they really ought to leave.”
Democrats also said they were struck by the offer — they just didn’t believe that the president would actually deliver.
“He’s not going to pay them,” Sen. Chris Murphy told NOTUS. “It’s as nonsensical as everything else.”
“I think it’s a trick,” Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine said. “As soon as people send that in saying, ‘I want to resign,’ he knows who doesn’t want to work for him.”
Virginia has one of the largest federal workforce populations in the country, and it would feel the outsize impact of any drastic reduction in the federal workforce.
“There’s no guarantee that he’d pay him, and why would he?” Kaine said. “He stiffs contractors all the time. If he could kick them all out, not pay them and not fill their spots, he is shrinking government.”
Virginia Sen. Mark Warner also said federal workers risked drawing the administration’s ire by accepting its offer to resign.
“Let’s assume they revoke this crazy idea tomorrow, and you’ve signed up,” Warner said. “You don’t think you’re going to have a target, that you’re going to be first to go, to be thrown out.”
“If our best scientists quit, our folks are protecting our food safety quit, what is that going to mean?” Warner continued. “This may be the way certain people run tech businesses. It’s not the way you run an enterprise that is critical to our national security.”
The deferred resignation offer directly mirrored tactics used by Elon Musk during his takeover at Twitter, down to the subject line: “Fork in the Road.” Musk ultimately axed 80% of Twitter’s staff, and on Tuesday, he shared a post projecting that, of the 2.3 million federal employees, “5-10% of the workforce is estimated to quit.”
(Attrition in the federal workforce has averaged around 6.3% in the last five years, with the rate peaking at 7.6% in 2022.)
OMB said the “majority of federal agencies are likely to be downsized through restructurings, realignments, and reductions in force.” And guidance from the Office of Personnel Management mirrored Musk’s email to Twitter staff: “We will insist on excellence at every level.”
“Those deciding to take the deferred resignation deal can do anything they want for the next 8 months and are not required to work at all whatsoever,” Musk said in a separate post, calling the terms “very generous.”
Musk has worked out of D.C. since Trump’s inauguration, as he sets up the Department of Government Efficiency out of the United States Digital Service, now renamed the “U.S. DOGE Service.”
OMB itself is set to be run by Musk ally and Silicon Valley venture capitalist Scott Kupor, but Trump isn’t waiting for Kupor’s Senate confirmation to attempt one of the largest shake-ups of the federal workforce in recent history.
The offer to federal employees represented Musk and Trump’s largest foray to date toward their promised reduction of the federal workforce.
Sen. Ed Markey said he respected Musk’s business ventures but decried his influence over agencies like OMB.
“Putting a mission on Mars, having a hole that can be burrowed 10 miles underground, it’s impressive, but not as complex as democracy and understanding our United States Constitution,” Markey continued. “Elon Musk needs to be put into a remedial constitutional law course and that’s what we’re going to do on him,”
Markey was among the lawmakers to cast doubt on the legality of any resignation agreement.
“I think it’s very doubtful that what the president has proposed is legal,” Markey said. “I would just have people be very cautious.”
And Kaine said he didn’t think Trump had “the legal authority” to make such an offer.
Meanwhile, Republicans said departing employees should just take what they can get.
“I wouldn’t bet against Donald Trump,” Tuberville said. “So, yeah, he’s got the power to do it. They work for him, he’s the executive officer of the executive branch, so he can pretty much do what he wants.”
The resignation terms are offered to nearly all of the federal workforce with few exceptions: Postal Service workers, those in the military and national security and immigration personnel.
American Federation of Government Employees President Everett Kelley urged workers not to accept the offer for the time being.
“Purging the federal government of dedicated career civil servants will have vast, unintended consequences that will cause chaos for the Americans who depend on a functioning federal government,” Kelley said in a statement Tuesday. “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.”
Correction: Virginia has one of the largest populations of federal workers in the country.
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Mark Alfred is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.