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Tens of thousands of U.S. government workers have chosen to resign rather than endure what many view as a torturous wait for the Trump administration to carry out its threats to fire them, say unions, governance experts and the employees themselves.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order on taking office to dramatically slash the size and cost of government. Four months later, mass layoffs at the largest agencies have yet to materialize and courts have slowed the process.
Instead, most of the roughly 260,000 civil servants who have left or will leave by the end of September have taken buyouts or other incentives to quit. Some told Reuters they could no longer live with the daily stress of waiting to be fired after multiple warnings from Trump administration officials that they could lose their jobs in the next wave of layoffs.
As a result, Trump and tech billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have managed to cut nearly 12% of the 2.3 million-strong federal civilian workforce largely through threats of firings, buyouts and early retirement offers, a Reuters review of agency departures found.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment for this story. Trump and Musk say the federal bureaucracy is bloated, inefficient and beset with waste and fraud.
The White House has yet to provide an official tally of the number of people leaving the federal workforce. It said 75,000 took the first of two buyout offers but has not said how many took a second buyout offer last month. Under the scheme, civil servants will receive full pay and benefits through September 30, with most not having to work during that period.
Deep cuts are earmarked for several agencies, including over 80,000 jobs at the Department of Veterans Affairs, and 10,000 at the Department of Health and Human Services.
Since January, many government workers have spoken of living in fear of being fired. Many agencies have sent regular emails to staff that couple incentives to quit with warnings that those who stay face the possibility of being laid off.
They have also endured cramped offices after Trump ordered all remote workers to return to work and dysfunction inside their agencies caused by a brain drain of experienced workers.
Don Moynihan, a professor at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, said a series of moves by DOGE and Trump have worn down the early defiance of many civil servants and led them to leave the workforce, a strategy that avoids the legal pitfalls of firing them.
They include the first buyout offer, which told workers they needed to leave their “lower productivity” jobs; a demand by Musk for workers to summarize five things they had achieved at work in the previous week, and workers being asked to do jobs they were not trained for.
“It’s inappropriate to think of these as voluntary resignations. Many of these employees feel that they were forced out,” Moynihan said.
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Charlotte Reynolds, 58, took an early retirement offer and left her job as a senior tax analyst at the tax-collecting Internal Revenue Service on April 30.
Reynolds chose not to take the first buyout offer in January, deciding to tough things out. By April she had had enough.
“They told us we weren’t productive, we weren’t useful. I’ve devoted 33 years to working for the IRS and I worked hard. It made me feel horrible,” Reynolds said.
Union Anger
Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, the biggest federal workers’ union with 800,000 members, cited comments made by Trump’s budget chief Russ Vought when he said government workers needed to feel “trauma.”
“When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work,” Vought said in 2023 at an event at the think tank he founded, the Center for Renewing America.
“The president has empowered people like Elon Musk and his DOGE team to harass, insult, and lie about federal employees and the work they do and force tens of thousands of employees off the job,” Kelley said.
Vought did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
An employee at the Social Security Administration, which oversees benefits for older and disabled Americans, said he decided to take the second buyout offer, in part because the uncertainty of what might happen to him each day took a toll.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, for fear of having the buyout offer rescinded, the worker said the stress led him to stay up later, drink more and exercise less.
“There were definitely moments when I felt defeated,” the worker said. “It turned your world upside down.”
Dozens of lawsuits have challenged Trump administration efforts to fire federal workers.
In the broadest ruling so far, a California federal judge on May 9 temporarily barred layoffs at 20 agencies including the departments of Agriculture, Health and Human Services, Treasury and Veterans Affairs and said workers who had already lost their jobs must be reinstated.
The administration is appealing the ruling, which said Trump can only restructure federal agencies with authorization from Congress.
The lack of mass layoffs at big agencies to date does not mean Trump won’t trigger them in coming months, especially if the legal obstacles to mass firings are lifted by appeals courts.
(Reporting by Tim Reid; Additional reporting by Nathan Layne; editing by Ross Colvin and Howard Goller)
