When the federal Office of Personnel Management first proposed a “deferred resignation” package to induce federal workers to quit last week, Elon Musk circulated an estimate that the offer could lure 5 to 10 percent of the government’s work force to leave. That estimate so far looks like an overshoot.
By midday Friday, with the original Thursday deadline to accept the offer now paused by a federal judge, more than 65,000 workers had planned to resign, said McLaurine Pinover, a spokesperson for O.P.M. That number — which could still rise further amid legal uncertainty — represents less than 3 percent of all 2.3 million federal workers, excluding the military and Postal Service.
For perspective, about 150,000 federal workers, or 7 percent, voluntarily leave the government every year. The scale of resignations submitted as of Friday — offered in exchange for seven months of pay and benefits — would be the equivalent of five months’ worth of departures, many of which might have happened this year anyway.
In other words, the federal government is an enormous work force that already experiences sizable turnover every year. In addition to workers who leave the government to retire or simply to quit, about another 50,000 to 60,000 are terminated every year for disciplinary or performance reasons, or because their appointments or funds expired. A small number — around 3,400 — die each year while employed by the government. All these departures are typically replaced by about 240,000 hires each year.
President Trump and Mr. Musk are also aiming to reduce the work force by squeezing this second group — new employees — through a hiring freeze for large portions of federal workers. In terms of reducing total head count, the hiring freeze could matter more than encouraging resignations.
Now the resignations that have been submitted may not even go through. On Thursday afternoon, a federal judge in Massachusetts froze the plan in response to a lawsuit by several employee unions who challenged the government’s legal authority to make such an offer. A hearing is scheduled for Monday.
With the resignation plan and its legal status now uncertain, the federal government was moving swiftly this week to prepare for additional cuts, sending staff reduction targets to health and science agencies and more.
Recently hired federal employees also typically work on a probationary basis for the first year (or longer at some agencies) and are easier to fire during that time. The Trump administration appears to be preparing to reduce the work force by targeting these workers. Several agencies have already been asked to share lists of such vulnerable employees.
But even with involuntary layoffs, achieving Mr. Musk’s goal of major budgetary savings through staff reductions cannot easily be achieved without reductions in workers who provide popular public services.
Average pay for federal workers is about $106,000, meaning the annual savings from salary alone, just to use 65,000 workers as a benchmark, could amount to around $6.9 billion per year (Mr. Musk has said the broader goal of his Department of Government Efficiency is to cut government spending by $4 billion a day). The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the government spent roughly $271 billion compensating federal civilian employees in 2022, with more than half of that going to the Department of Defense, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Homeland Security.
Among agencies where cuts may prove politically perilous, Veterans Affairs is the largest employer in the government. The V.A. runs a network of hospitals and health clinics around the country for military veterans. The department has already exempted hundreds of thousands of these health care workers from the government-wide hiring freeze announced by President Trump on his first day in office.
Mr. Trump has also exempted several other categories of workers shown above, including in the Department of Homeland Security, which carries out immigration enforcement, and in the Department of Defense.
The I.R.S. this week also told some employees trying to resign now that they could not take leave under the deferred resignation until after May 15, an apparent acknowledgment that mass departures now could disrupt tax filing season for millions of Americans.
The post How Many Federal Worker Resignations Would Be a Lot? appeared first on New York Times.
