Another buyout offer hits inboxes of some federal workers

Thousands of federal workers are newly reeligible for a Trump administration offer paying them to quit as agencies prepare to shed up to half of their staffs, documents reviewed by The Washington Post show.

The deal, extended across at least five agencies in recent days, resurrects an option to resign now and be paid through September. President Donald Trump and his adviser, billionaire Elon Musk, extended the offer early in their push to shrink the federal workforce. About 75,000 employees took the deal in its first round, officials said then, as unions mounted legal challenges panning the program as arbitrary and coercive.

The administration has escalated its campaign to overhaul a 2.3-million-person civil service that Trump has derided as bloated and corrupt. On Tuesday, the Department of Health and Human Services conducted a sweeping purge of senior leaders and employees across the agencies that oversee government health programs, a signal that a new round of cuts across the government may be underway. Some workers at HHS and at the General Services Administration were told they would have to pick up and move or resign, correspondence shows.

Trump officials against that backdrop said the offer represented a life raft for workers who found themselves in positions the administration deemed nonessential in its quest to cut spending and tame a mounting national deficit.

“We could have just fired people and not given them an off-ramp,” White House principal deputy press secretary Harrison Fields said in an interview. “For all of this talk about disruption, we are affording people an off-ramp that no other private or public sector job would.”

Offer letters were emailed to staff at the General Services Administration and the departments of Energy, Agriculture, Transportation and Defense with acceptance deadlines ranging from April 7 to April 18. It was not clear whether the offer would be extended to employees at other agencies.

Several federal workers who decided against the first offer said in interviews Tuesday that they were considering taking the second one—citing concerns about looming layoffs, the daily stress of working for the administration and improvements to a process that last time began with an ominous email in January from the White House’s Office of Personnel Management titled “Fork in the Road.”

Unions and many Democratic lawmakers implored federal employees then not to take the deal, questioning whether Trump and Musk would keep their word and noting that spending on the civil service accounts for a fraction of the national budget. The number of federal workers overall is largely flat—and down as a percentage of the nation’s total workforce, economists’ preferred metric—over the last four decades, according to federal data.

Many said they trusted this offer more because it came from a name or email address they recognized. Others said they were waiting for word on their eligibility, classifications that vary by agency. Some said they were more prepared to leave their longtime workplaces now because they had spent the last few months searching for private-sector jobs.

“It feels more structured and less chaotic than the first time,” said one Department of Agriculture employee, speaking on the condition of anonymity, like others in this article, to avoid professional repercussions. “We’d work with our agency instead of responding to a mysterious OPM inbox, not knowing if the government would actually carry through on the agreement.”

He said he will probably take the deal.

The shift to having agencies communicate the offer comes after the Trump administration repeatedly ran into legal trouble when attempting to make staffing changes via directives from the personnel office.

“This time around, the Administration has greater legal clarity about what they can legally do, and how to frame the offers with more clarity,” Donald Kettl, a professor emeritus at the University of Maryland who specializes in the civil service, wrote in a text message. “That gives them a chance in some agencies to convince more people to leave.”

A White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations, said the new round of offers was meant to decrease the number of people the administration has to fire to achieve its vision for a smaller workforce.

“We want to make sure that there aren’t more people that would self-DOGE to make whatever cut we are doing the most strategic,” the official said, referring to an acronym for the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency, a non-Cabinet agency steering reduction efforts.

An employee briefed on leadership deliberations at Veterans Affairs said the decision to reopen the resignation offer was tied to the need to reduce the agency’s workforce by between 70,000 and 80,000. And the email that went out to staff at the Energy Department said the agency was reinstating the buyout offer “to mitigate the effect of potential involuntary separations.”

By midday Tuesday, the rollout had run into snags. One probationary employee at the Department of Agriculture said he knew the second round of resignation offers went out Tuesday, but he could not check his work email to see if he qualified because he had been placed on leave.

Then, to his surprise, a message arrived to his personal email account from the human resources arm of his department, offering all probationary employees the second-round deferred resignation offer, according to the email reviewed by The Post.

It began with “Hello!!!”—which he found a strange tone to strike.

He noticed he could see the list of all email recipients: 397 personal addresses copied on the message. Scrolling through, the employee recognized the names of a few colleagues.

“It honestly felt violating,” the employee said. “I don’t want everyone to have access to my personal email.”

Just before 5:30 p.m., he received a second email. It recalled the deferred resignation offer without explanation.

The Department of Agriculture in a statement said that the “HR staff within a single mission area mistakenly did not BCC the deferred resignation program offer to a group of probationary employees.”

It continued: “However, it is interesting that instead of informing the impacted mission area’s leadership of the mistake so it could be rectified, probationary employees chose to leak the memo to the press. This reiterates the need to follow President Trump’s leadership and return the Department to a customer service focused, farmer first agency.”

Staffers at the Federal Aviation Administration also received the offer Tuesday, as they braced for possible cuts. One employee said that while the initial deal, which echoed language Musk had used to offer buyouts at his company, stunned him, seeing the communication come from his own agency felt as if his leadership was “okaying and green-lighting” Musk’s tactics.

Within the Energy Department, one staffer said he is more likely to take this offer in part because he trusts that he will receive his payout. Last time, the deal was extended before Congress had negotiated a budget deal, but lawmakers have since agreed to terms that fund operations through the end of September.

After nearly two decades of service, the staffer, who has a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering, said he had begun looking to jump to the private sector—a move that he could make under the terms of the deal. He recently finished a third-round interview with a company he likes.