It’s a Scam! It’s a Purge! It’s a Scam *and* a Purge

How to think about Trump’s plans for the federal workforce

Before Donald Trump was inaugurated, there was extensive discussion of his known plans to convert a number of civil service jobs into presidential appointments, politicizing the higher levels of the federal bureaucracy. Since the inauguration, however, it has become clear that almost everyone greatly understated the threat. We’re now seeing clear efforts to politicize everything, to force every federal employee to act, in effect, as a MAGA operative.

The latest and biggest move has come in the form of an email from the Office of Personnel Management, which appears to have effectively been taken over by associates of Elon Musk, effectively offering a buyout to federal employees who resign in the next few days. On paper, it isn’t exactly a buyout; those who accept the offer will be placed on administrative leave but supposedly continue to be paid until September. But being told that you can stop working while receiving eight months’ salary is just a buyout by another name.

There are five things you should know about this plan:

1. It’s illegal

2. It’s almost surely a scam: workers who take the offer probably won’t see the money they’ve been promised

3. To the extent that workers actually take up the offer, they’ll be the workers we can least afford to lose

4. The move will cost, not save money

5. What this really amounts to is a purge, replacing professional civil servants with political loyalists

Legality: Some initial reports described the Trump plan — or is it the Musk plan? — as if it were a simple buyout, which immediately raised the question, where would the money come from? Congress hasn’t voted funding for a mass worker buyout, and the president doesn’t have the right to spend money without Congressional authorization.

The “administrative leave” language was probably intended as a way to get around that little problem. But someone didn’t do their homework. The law appears to make it clear that federal employees can be placed on administrative leave for no more than 10 days in a calendar year.

Now, does the law still matter? Laws must be enforced by people, and maybe we’re already at a place where Trump can simply ignore Congress’s power of the purse, choosing not to spend money on things Congress has funded while spending money on things it hasn’t authorized. But I don’t think we’re quite there yet.

The big scam: If you accept Trump’s deal, resigning but expecting to receive 8 months’ salary, you’re a fool. Trump has a history of not paying what he owes; the Wall Street Journal reported that his business career “left a long trail of unpaid bills,” while a separate study from USA Today found hundreds of contractors alleging that Trump doesn’t pay his bills.

So if you accept the not-a-buyout offer believing in Trump’s promise to keep paying your salary — a promise that won’t even be legally binding, because the whole thing is illegal anyway — you should expect to be stiffed. That’s just who he is and how he operates.

Losing the best: Some federal employees may be naïve enough to accept President Musk’s not-a-buyout offer. Others — my guess is a significant number of high-level workers — may leave because they’ve concluded that politicization and disrespect has degraded their work environment to the point that it’s not worth staying.

So who will leave? The workers we as a nation can least afford to lose.

Many people probably imagine that the federal government offers cushy, well-paid jobs. And as a 2024 report from the Congressional Budget showed, federal workers without a college degree generally do earn more than their counterparts in the private sector — in part because many of them are unionized:

Source: Congressional Budget Office

But more highly educated federal employees earn substantially less than their counterparts in the private sector. And my personal observation is that this is especially true for people with real expertise. I know federal employees who could clearly be making two or three times their current salaries if they moved to Wall Street. In fact, some of them actually did move to highly paid private-sector jobs for a while, before returning to public service even though it involved a big pay cut.

Why did they pay that price? Because they didn’t feel that their lucrative private-sector jobs had meaning in the way public service did. We live in an age in which it’s fashionable to bash government, but my experience has always been that, especially at the higher levels of the civil service, there’s far more idealism, far more eagerness to, well, serve than most people imagine.

But if the government is taken over by hacks with no respect for expertise — who, in fact, distrust people who know what they’re doing, and who value political loyalty above all else — the idealists will leave.

Money: From the earliest days of DOGE, it was obvious that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy — who does, in fact, appear to have been run out of DOGE — had no idea how the federal government spends its money. They made a big deal out of reducing the federal headcount, apparently imagining that payroll is a big part of the federal budget. In fact, civilian compensation is a small slice of the budget:

Source: Congressional Budget Office

And when you bear in mind that the not-a-buyout and the general politicization of the federal bureaucracy will systematically drive out people who are good at their jobs, it seems highly likely that the Musk/Trump actions will end up costing taxpayers money, perhaps a lot of it.

So why are they doing this? There isn’t really any mystery about what’s happening here. It’s possible that Elon Musk or whoever came up with this plan really believes that there’s a lot of deadwood in the federal work force — never underestimate how ignorant these people are about the government they’re trying to take over — but it’s pretty clear that the principal motivation is political. This is a purge, an attempt to push out government workers who believe that their job is to serve the public and replace them with Trump loyalists.

Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy, gave the game away during an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper. Tapper was trying to ask about the effects of the administration’s (also illegal) spending freeze, but Miller veered off course into a diatribe against the civil service:

I want to really drill down on this, Jake, because it’s so important. There’s two million employees in the federal government. Overwhelmingly, the career federal service in this country is far left, left-wing.

That’s an absurd claim, unless you consider anyone who doesn’t regard Trump as our divinely anointed ruler far-left. Miller also claimed that 98 percent of USAID workers donated to Kamala Harris or “another left-wing candidate,” which is highly implausible — and also none of his business. The whole point of having a civil service is that the political leanings of federal workers aren’t supposed to matter.

And that professionalism is what they’re trying to kill.

MUSICAL CODA

For the dedicated public servants who will, I fear, finally decide that they can’t take it any more. Maybe a bit too cheerful, but you look for joy where you can find it.