After Trump Administation Offers Buyouts To Over 2 Million Federal Workers, Union Leaders Tell Them Not Accept

On Tuesday evening, the White House sent an email offering to buy out federal workers who don’t want to return to the office after President Donald Trump terminated policies allowing remote work. The email was sent using a new mass email system set up by the Trump administration to contact all federal employees simultaneously.

The administration hopes the buyout could significantly reduce the size of the federal workforce by nearly 10%. It offers the workers the opportunity to take a “deferred resignation.” This would mean that the employees agree to resign now and will get paid through September. The buyouts, the administration projects, could save taxpayers around $100 billion a year.

The subject line echoed an email sent by Elon Musk to Twitter employees during the transition to X, giving them the option to leave or stay and become “hardcore.” Musk reacted to the news of the payouts, calling it a “fork in the road” in a post to X on Tuesday evening.

“American taxpayers pay for the salaries of federal government employees, and therefore deserve employees working on their behalf who actually show up to work in our wonderful federal buildings, also paid for by taxpayers,” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said. “If they don’t want to work in the office and contribute to making America great again, then they are free to choose a different line of work, and the Trump Administration will provide a very generous payout of eight months.”

Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) union, denounced the buyouts. “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,” she said.

The employees will have until Feb 6 to respond to the buyout offer. The email also said that employees who do not take the buyout cannot be given “full assurance regarding the certainty” of their position. If their positions are terminated, they “will be treated with dignity and will be afforded the protections in place for such positions,” the email continued.

The email also noted the addition of furloughs and “the reclassification to at-will status for a substantial number of federal employees.” In addition to the return-to-office policy and crackdown on DEI, the new policies have federal workers feeling uneasy. Though the buyout is intended to be an exit for employees who do not want to return to office, most government employees can take it.

Postal workers, military positions, immigration officials, and other unspecified national security roles are excluded from the offer.