I think the main issue for anyone wanting to take the offer is simply: this was never authorized by congress, so the money to pay people to September is questionable if it exists at best. Meanwhile, there's a government funding deadline on March 14, 2025. So there's a very real chance at this deal offering something closer to ~1 month of pay before it suddenly gets dropped due to budget negotiations.<p>It would be an incredibly generous and nice buyout package, but obviously if it gets torn up after a month it's not that great of a deal.
> The buyout offer entitles federal employees to stop working more or less immediately and continue to be paid through Sept. 30.<p>> The federal workforce's normal attrition rate is about 6% a year, meaning some of those who've taken the buyout may have been planning to leave government service anyway.<p>Wow, talk about an amazing deal if you already happened to be planning on leaving...
I've always found this approach of reducing the number of employees unwise from the company perspective (but pretty good for the employees, though).<p>While the unsatisfied employees are the target, my observations indicate that a high percentage of active and skilled people are willing to take this offer, as they are sure that they will find a new place within a reasonable time, so it's basically, free money. And those are the people that the company should try to keep as much as it could.
While the "give me a task with the perfect description, and I will do it" folks will stay until they are kicked out, as, usually, they are not up to taking the initiative.<p>That's why I saw how the companies that were changing the rules in the process: "well, it's an offer, but your manager needs to approve that first", and other tricks to be able to reject it for the top performers. Needless to say, it leads to the bad moral.<p>However, the companies I'm mentioning had way fewer employees than the federal workforce, so the chances are that with that size it's impossible to do it the "right" way.
Just some context:<p><pre><code> 2.9M federal employees
0.6% have taken buyout
</code></pre>
<a href="https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-people-work-for-the-federal-government/" rel="nofollow">https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-people-work-for-the-f...</a>
The plan seems to be to fire almost all government emoloyees. The only historical parallel I can come up with is the De Baathification program in Iraq 2003.
Being asked to take a deal that the administration may be offering illegally is a wild situation to be in. Especially when the administration doing so seems to have little regard for the law, and SCOTUS has deemed them above the law to some extent.<p>Are you making a deal they will actually pay, and could it be that the administration simply chooses to ignore the courts?
Not an American, but the reported resignation process of just sending arbitrary content email with subject "resign" to "hr@opm.gov" feels like the real aim is to collect emails and response time data to establish cluster system health metric to determine which nodes can be murdered safely.<p>It's almost strange to me that this aspect, and stupidity of injecting non-compiling code to human mainframes collective that runs on legalese in an attempt to collect such data, seem to be rarely discussed.
Related:<p>“Will Employees Who Resign Have a Remedy?”<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42950301">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42950301</a>
As someone who has been offered similar buy-outs, the one presented here is a poor deal. I would not have taken that one unless I already had a job waiting for me.
It's interesting that annual attrition rate is 6% according to the article. I hadn't considered that before. The buyouts could end up costing more than they save if the only people who take it were the ones already planning on leaving.<p>But maybe the argument is if enough people take it before the March budget deadline, then each departments budget can be proportionately reduced in the next cycle.<p>Does anyone know the math and politics on this? Why didn't DOGE just put hiring freezes in place and wait for people to leave? Honest question. I'm not looking to bait anyone into mud slinging about Trump and Elon.
Now just imagine every future administration does this, and we have more or less returned to the Spoils System through a loophole.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoils_system" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoils_system</a>
Update on this: NYTimes today reported that<p>> Later in the agreement, it makes clear that any of the administration’s obligations “are subject to the availability of appropriations.”<p>In other words, if it's not in an upcoming deal to raise the debt ceiling, then it won't necessarily be funded. As many in this thread have speculated, it is not guaranteed.<p>Federal workers, proceed at your own risk.
Late to the party, but I know of at least two highly-paid coworkers that already had plans to retire, but are now just hoping for several months of extra pay (it's essentially the only situation where I would recommend someone take this offer-- if it works out, great for them; if it doesn't, well they were going to leave anyway)
It’s quite similar to the student loan forgiveness in terms of it being about financial obligations to middle class citizens and it being attempted without Congress, as well as the likelihood for overpromising and underdelivering. The ordinary citizens making a choice in a way that would have an effect like promissory estoppel adds an interesting wrinkle but I don’t see how it changes the constitutionality of it. I think that many of those calling it unconstitutional are being hypocritical, even though they may be right.
If you are a federal employee that got an email from these scumbags, look at who is extending this "offer." Trump, who has stiffed everyone who ever did work for him, and Musk, who still is being sued by lots of Twitter employees especially execs, for their unpaid severance. They are the most untrustworthy people ever to serve in the federal government.
The quality of the comments is really disappointing. I'll add an optimistic one -- this is the first time in my lifetime that I've felt like the federal government was actually making serious progress on an important problem without being forced to by some emergency. I'm very curious to see what things look like a year from now.
I'm sure that the guys who are otherwise being incredibly cruel to almost everyone in the US in some way, but who have offered an uncharacteristically generous severance package, have every intention of honouring that package.
Who knows how evenly spread it is? It may be that each service gets better, it may be all services stay the same except for, say, NRO, and we miss a nuclear center being built.
The idea that government workers cannot be hired and fired at will is wrong.<p>Government workers should have no more rights than the single mother working at a restaurant or business, or anyone working at any normal business in the US.<p>I other words, they should not have more rights or protections than the people who pay the taxes that pay for their salaries and benefits.<p>One of the most fundamental problems in various types of organizations with these types of protections is what I call "human rot". These are people who are lazy and incompetent and who only remain employed because of these protections as opposed to merit, doing a good job and actually making valuable contributions to the organization.<p>Locally, one of the most disgusting examples I came across is a middle school "science" teacher who is a chiropractor and teaches absolute nonsense and falsehoods to our kids. For example --and this is just one of many-- he has been teaching that the moon does not spin on its axis. Yeah. Beyond that, he is a jerk to the kids and does not allow them to ask questions. He cannot be challenged or fired for any of it. He is protected. And we wonder why our results in education are shit.