> The resignations—which come as part of a program drawn up by President Donald Trump at the start of his second administration—will happen on Tuesday as Congress is facing a deadline on the same day to authorize more funding or risk a government shutdown.
> If there is no deal, the White House has ordered federal agencies to make plans for the large-scale redundancies.
Genuine question, because I don't know the answer. Was it actually voluntary at the time?
Source: Federal workers I know personally, and numerous public statements from DOGE officials and cabinet secretaries when this offer was made.
> “The reality is clear: A large-scale reduction, in response to the President’s workforce executive orders, is already happening. The government is restructuring, and unfortunately, many employees will later realize they missed a valuable, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” the official said.
- https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/04/politics/trump-administration...
Historical example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Australian_constitutional...
[0] what would be called the Administration in the US
Well, yes. That's what the DRP was, they were put on administrative leave through 30 September. It's kind of hard to work when you're on admin leave. Are you surprised by the fact that this group of DRP folks are resigning on 30 Sept when that was the agreement they signed under the DRP? Did you expect something else?
Flagged as misleading/inflammatory. Most of the comments here are probably bots.
The same goes for the other DOGE employment initiative of firing probationary employees. These are mostly either people you have just hired or those that have been promoted. Of course, these are the employees you would most want to keep.
Since Reagan, the Republican party's stance has always been that government can't do anything right, so we should get rid of as much of it as possible, and every time Republicans have had the power to do so, they've sabotaged various agencies, then pointed to the inevitable problems that arise as proof of their claim.
An example of this was decommissioning mail sorting machines during Trump's first term, resulting in mail delays.
If you get rid of the most competent government workers, then obviously, government services will function less effectively, which will serve to bolster claims that those services simply don't work and should be shuttered anyway.
As for motive, it's a way for the Trump admin to clear out the federal workforce and install loyalists to make it easier for him to carry out his agenda.
One part is what I call "The Great Defederalization". In a myriad of ways, the federal state that was erected between FDR and LBJ is being torn down. That state existed on a group of decisions that allowed independent agencies outside of the direct oversight of the president: the Humphrey's Executor agencies, NLRB, FCC, FTC. The Supreme Court and Congress are very happy to work on rolling them back, and they were constructed on pretty awful jurisprudence to begin with. That can work-- we should engage in creative destruction, the administrative state did restrict economic growth, and it did create carve-outs out of the Constitution. If it made us a more reliable partner, that did come at the cost of flexibility.
But at the same time, this executive isn't defederalizing to defer power to the states-- it's doing it to grant more immediate power to the president, who is in effect weaponizing the armed forces and police forces against non-compliant localities and personal enemies. News like this happening the same week as the president sends the Army to a passive American city in order to plainly provoke a conflict, and directing his DoJ to enact a case on paper thin justification, is troubling, to say the least.
A consequence of centralizing governance in a giant federal bureaucracy is that it’s become dominated by one party: https://www.govexec.com/pay-benefits/2016/10/federal-employe.... That was a predictable result of federalization. If the government is run by unelected bureaucrats insulated from the elected officials, then it’s completely unsurprising it will become dominated by the party that prefers bigger government.
In classic Trump fashion, he doesn’t care about federalism per se, hence his inconsistent actions on law enforcement and crime. But he has a brain stem level reaction that it’s crazy he got elected President and is expected to cajole a federal workforce of 1.8 million democrats into executing his policies. And he’s not wrong about that.
Regarding the DOJ, Thomas Jefferson personally directed the prosecution of Aaron Burr: https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/the-great-trial-that-tes.... So that part isn’t anything new. As to the merits of the case, 18 USC 1001 is astonishingly (and I’d argue unconstitutionally) broad. I think prosecuting people for “obstruction” without an underlying crime is bullshit, but the government does it all the time. And Comey vociferously defended the practice.
Also, if you're saying that the past 100 years of American history, with all its various technocrats, was the result of a single ideology operating the government... maybe that ideology actually works pretty well?
As recently as 1880s the US was still assigning important civil service roles to whomever donated the most money to election campaigns.
The 1880s - 1970s generally featured a more protected civil service, with both advantages (insulation from changing presidents / legislators, maintaining institutional knowledge and competence) and disadvantages (insulation from performance-based hiring / firing, optimizing for bureaucratic rules became more effective than doing a great job).
The latter of which and anti-government sentiment post-Nixon drove deregulation and more direct executive control of the bureaucracy (e.g. the OPM).
As with all pendulums, we're now again seeing the excesses of affording too much power to the presidency (firing institutional knowledge because their role/expertise isn't currently politically en vogue).
Hopefully post-Trump this will spur reinforcing and insulation of civil service expertise.
So they're getting out because "it's time I guess. Not much else I can do."
pm90•1h ago
It’s also not clear how to recover from something like this.
kleinsch•1h ago
xnx•58m ago
cogman10•58m ago
You pretty much have to double spend to get out. Same way ICE is handling recruitment shortfalls.
Government jobs have never had great salaries (but decent benefits) vs the private sector. You need to make those jobs actually competitive.
burkaman•53m ago
buran77•57m ago
As a side effect, if they're to lose the next election they leave a corpse on the doorstep of the next administration. That makes it so much easier to pass on the blame.
Aligns perfectly with these people's views that a country is best led like a company not like a democracy. The realistic outcome will be formally (rather than the informal one as until now) corpocracy.
rayiner•55m ago
No matter who wins the elections, most of the actual decisions are being made by adherents of the same party. Trump had four times the support in AOC’s district in the Bronx than among federal employee donors. This is not a sustainable situation in a democracy.
actionfromafar•39m ago
buran77•37m ago
Purging your enemies from everything and instead putting your buddies (especially as dishonest and unqualified as the ones this admin brought) will fix the current "unsustainable" situation? Is it even marginally less bad? Because looking from the distance what they're doing is changing from "not great" to "awful" for democracy, and looking close up I'm sure it looks even worse.
There's not a single illegal, abusive, or plain stupid thing that this admin has done where you can't find some "silver lining" that allows you to dilute the problem and make it look like you're part of some solution. "And well, the implementation may not have been perfect but we're trying to fix things".
Nothing about this was for democracy or the country and who those people donate do doesn't matter. Only who they don't donate to.
fabbari•17m ago
For example: true, 99.4% of the donations from the USDA employees went to the Democratic part. 99.4% of how many donations? Less than 3,000. - Source [0] - and that's an overestimate, since that filter will include donations from 2015.
How many employees work for the USDA? About 100,000 [1].
That means that 97,000 people made no donations - to either party.
[0] https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individual-contributions/?...
[1]
morcus•16m ago
actionfromafar•51m ago
at-fates-hands•45m ago
Not really sure ANY government service runs well. There are maybe one or two but as a whole government run anything never seems to be done well or at a decent cost. Just scan the comments about the massive overspending and poor service we already get as taxpayers.
Trying to get a properly run government program or service has been going on since the country was founded.
ss2003•24m ago
Really? You think no government services runs well? None what so ever???
buran77•13m ago
I don't think you have perspective on that. What I'm telling you is that it can be a lot worse. I don't think you realize how much less accountable any private company is and that if you are ever ruled by one you will effectively be under a very abusive dictatorship, for all intents and purposes.
Random example. Google can cut you off from everything Google related and then some (identity, data, purchases, anything external that was linked to Google identity, etc.) with no recourse or justification. How often does the Government do that to you?
It's very easy to complaint when you've never seen the worse alternatives. How many people alive in US today do you think have even lived under them?
ldoughty•52m ago
timr•50m ago
Moreover, the vast majority of federal workers don't have anything to do with the kind of consumer-facing services that people think of when they think "government". More than half of all federal employees comprise: the Defense departments (Army, Navy, DoD, etc.), the Department of Homeland Security and the VA [3].
The federal workforce continues to get bigger and bigger, there's absolutely no practical incentive to stop it, and congress has abjectly failed to do its job in controlling the budget.
To be clear, this is not the right way to reduce the size of the federal government, but I'm not "terrified" of losing 100k employees in a government of this size. We need more cutting, not less.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/01/07/what-the-...
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/01/07/what-the-...
[3] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/01/07/what-the-...
grumbelbart•45m ago
That's less than it seems though, given that the US population has grown with over 0.7% per year for most of those years.
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/uni...
timr•38m ago
So what? Why does government have to grow proportionally with the size of the population? This is not a given in any other organization.
SR2Z•14m ago