It’s been about a week since the Trump administration sent a highly provocative email to federal workers, offering them something resembling a deal. Government employees, the message said, could remain in their current positions, but without a guarantee that they won’t be fired.
On the other hand, according to the email, they also have the option of ending their careers, being placed on administrative leave, and possibly continuing to keep receiving their current paychecks until September. The administration described it as a “deferred resignation” policy.
As my MSNBC colleague James Downie noted, it was lost on no one that Elon Musk sent a very similar email to Twitter employees after he took control of the social media platform. Indeed, both emails were sent with the same phrase in the subject line: “Fork in the Road.”
It’s difficult to say with certainty how many federal employees, if any, took the appeal seriously, and two days after the initial message, Trump’s Office of Personnel Management sent a follow-up appeal, trying to cajole government workers to quit with a more brazenly ridiculous argument.
“The way to greater American prosperity is encouraging people to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector,” the agency told the workforce.
Paul Krugman, formerly of The New York Times, described the policy as “illegal,” noting that Congress hasn’t approved funding for such a scheme and that existing law prevents federal employees from being placed on administrative leave for more than 10 days in a calendar year. (Whether the White House still feels constrained by laws is a separate question, which has not yet been answered.)
It’s also an open question whether those who took the “deal” will actually get the money they’ve been promised.
As for why, exactly, he’s doing this, the president offered some new insights on Friday, after a reporter asked him whether his so-called buyout plan might adversely affect public safety.
“Everybody is replaceable, and we’ll get very good people to replace them if it turns out to be more than we thought,” Trump said. “It could be a lot; it could be a little. We don’t know.
“But we’d love to have them leave. We’re trying to — remember this — we want them to go into the private sector. It’s our dream to have everybody, almost, working in the private sector, not in the public sector.”
The first part of the answer was predictable: When he talked about replacing federal workers with “very good people,” Trump appeared to be pointing to a plan in which MAGA sycophants would fill the vacancies left by career employees of the federal government.
But it was the latter part of his response that struck me as especially significant: By sharing his “dream” of moving “almost” all public-sector employees to the private sector, the president effectively sketched out a vision that would break the federal government.
That might not have been what Americans thought they were voting for in November, but it’s what the Republican president and his team apparently want to do now that they’re in power.