President Trump offers civil servants eight months’ pay to resign in latest federal government overhaul
US president Donald Trump has offered civil servants buyout packages in the latest of a series of moves to overhaul the US government since he returned to office.
In an email sent to officials on Tuesday, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) said it would launch a “deferred resignation” programme, with staff being asked to decide by 6 February whether they wanted to leave the government. Those that did so would receive eight months’ salary as a severance package.
Details were published on the OPM website under the heading ‘Fork in the Road’, which set out that the offer had been made in the context of a number of changes Trump had already announced to the federal workforce. These include a requirement to return to the office five days a week; updated performance standards to produce “excellence at every level”; a downsized civil service with officials reclassified as political appointments; and “enhanced standards of conduct” with a requirement that employees “are reliable, loyal, trustworthy, and who strive for excellence in their daily work”.
OPM said it would thank officials who choose to remain in their current position, “for your renewed focus on serving the American people to the best of your abilities” and that it looked forward “to working together as part of an improved federal workforce”. However, it added that: “At this time, we cannot give you full assurance regarding the certainty of your position or agency but should your position be eliminated you will be treated with dignity and will be afforded the protections in place for such positions.”
Workers who choose to take the offer will be exempt from all applicable in-person work requirements until their departure by 30 September.
The Trump administration expects up to 10% of the estimated 3 million government employees to accept the offer, according to CBS News.
Read more: Japan looks to learn from Elon Musk’s US government efficiency programme
Department of Government Efficiency created
The resignation programme is the latest move that Trump has made since returning to the White House to shake up the federal government. In his inauguration speech, he pledged to “restore competence and effectiveness to our federal government”, and quickly took a number of executive actions to implement campaign polices.
As well as requiring all heads of government departments and agencies to end remote working arrangements and return to in-person work “as soon as practicable” – albeit with the ability for leaders to “make exemptions they deem necessary”– Trump also implemented a freeze on civil service recruitment, and an end to all diversity, equity, and inclusion programmes in the federal government within 60 days.
High-profile, early moves made by the president also include steps to create the Department of Government Efficiency.
The executive order re-named the United States Digital Service as the United States DOGE Service (USDS) to run the project as part of the Executive Office of the President for its proposed 18-month duration.
Under the order, the USDS will be headed by an administrator, who will report to the White House chief of staff. The overall aim of DOGE will be focused on modernising federal technology and software to improve government efficiency and productivity, with the USDS administrator tasked with undertaking a software modernisation initiative “to improve the quality and efficiency of government-wide software, network infrastructure, and information technology systems”.
Each federal government department will establish a DOGE team of at least four employees to coordinate their work with USDS, with a particular focus on promoting inter-operability between agency networks and systems, ensuring data integrity, and facilitating responsible data collection and synchronisation.
Government Service Delivery – the new name for GovernmentDX – will bring together global digital government leaders to explore how governments can use tech-driven innovation to deliver high-quality public services. The event will be held at Walter E Washington Convention Center, Washington DC on May 13-14, 2025. Find out more and register your interest here.
Freeze on civil service hiring
DOGE will also have a role in rewiring federal government recruitment. Ahead of the redundency notices, Trump issued an executive order that stopped federal hiring for “all executive departments and agencies regardless of their sources of operational and programmatic funding”. A federal hiring plan will be created in the administration’s first 120 days, led by the assistant to the president for domestic policy, in consultation with the director of the Office of Management and Budget, the director of the OPM, and the DOGE administrator.
The recruitment plan will be focused on bringing “to the federal workforce only highly skilled Americans dedicated to the furtherance of American ideals, values, and interests”.
Recruitment to the federal government will also change after Trump reinstated the Schedule F provisions that he had introduced – but not made use of – in his last term in office.
Schedule F was intended to convert a number of existing nonpartisan career civil servant roles to political appointee status, expanding the ranks of officials who are presidential appointments. The original executive order was revoked by president Biden in his first days in office in 2021. Trump’s new order reinstating the rule said it is vital to improve the accountability of the federal government.
According to the executive order, “only 41% of civil service supervisors are confident that they can remove an employee who engaged in insubordination or serious misconduct. Even fewer supervisors – 26% – are confident that they can remove an employee for poor performance.”
Therefore Schedule F – now renamed Schedule Policy/Career – would “restore accountability to the career civil service, beginning with positions of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character”. The executive order reinstates the provisions of Schedule F to move federal workers in policy-orientated roles from the government’s main federal pay scale to a new employment category, under which the usual civil service protections would not apply.
Donald Moynihan, the McCourt chair of public policy at Georgetown University, has said that the rule could make an additional 50,000 career civil servants political appointments, up from the estimated 4,000 that each president currently has to fill.
External Revenue Service created
Also in his first week in office, Trump set out what he called his “America first trade policy”, which aims to build a tariff system to address what the president called “unfair and unbalanced trade”.
According to the related executive order, “the secretary of commerce, in consultation with the secretary of the Treasury and the United States trade representative, shall investigate the causes of our country’s large and persistent annual trade deficits in goods, as well as the economic and national security implications and risks resulting from such deficits, and recommend appropriate measures, such as a global supplemental tariff or other policies, to remedy such deficits”.
The order said that the Treasury secretary would also “investigate the feasibility of establishing and recommend the best methods for designing, building, and implementing an External Revenue Service to collect tariffs, duties, and other foreign trade-related revenues”. Trump has said that tariff is “the most beautiful word in the dictionary”, and has proposed tariffs with the objective of forcing companies to produce in the US.
About Richard Johnstone
Related Posts
