Tag: buyout

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The author is a federal civil servant who has been granted the use of a pen name to protect them and their family from reprisals.

The new Trump administration’s effort to both get a grip on and dismantle the federal workforce has also been a dystopian farce, climaxing Tuesday evening, after the Office of Personnel Management sent an email offering what the media has described as a “buyout” to all federal employees. This saga began shortly after Donald Trump took office, when someone asserting the authority of OPM began spamming federal workers with emails demanding a reply. In one breath, the message asked all employees to respond “Yes” to confirm that the system was working, but it also warned employees to be cautious about the contents of emails coming to them. Meanwhile, the note itself was flagged, for recipients with a government email account, as having come from an “[EXTERNAL]” source—and thus not necessarily one to be trusted.

Then, Tuesday night, federal workers were sent an email announcing a “fork in the road.” Again, the message was flagged by government servers as “[EXTERNAL].” This email, much of which was copied and pasted from a similar message sent to Twitter employees after Elon Musk—Trump’s pick to lead his effort to overhaul the civil service, otherwise known as the Department of Government Efficiency—took over that company, proclaims that the federal workforce will be undergoing significant changes. Anyone who didn’t want to participate in this new vision was invited to reply “Resign” to the flagged-as-external email address and collect six months’ salary, without having to perform any additional work, while they looked for a new job. The details of this offer are confusing, conflict with later OPM “FAQs” about the program, and seem to run afoul of long-standing legal caps on severance packages.

Welcome to government by chatbot.

This latest buyout directive is evocative of A.I. gobbledygook, beyond evidently being a copy-and-paste job from Musk’s Twitter exploits. When technologists assess a new A.I. language tool, the go-to metric is generally not the accuracy of its product, or even the consistency of its answers. It is engagement. Substance is pushed aside in pursuit of simply keeping human eyeballs trained on its messages for as long as possible. Once considered a proxy for content’s ability to be “valuable” or “worthwhile,” attention itself has become the commodity we’re after: looks, likes, clicks, play next episode. Unfortunately, one of the easiest ways to engage people is to enrage them.

Like a chatbot in training, the Musk-Miller-Trump administration is not a principled political entity concerned with substance, consistency, or competence. In the administration’s executive order regarding TikTok, for instance, the president endeavored to grant rights to private companies in one paragraph (the DOJ “shall take no action to enforce the Act or impose any penalties against any entity for any noncompliance with the Act”), while specifically disclaiming the gift to TikTok in another (“this order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States”). This was a presidential pinky-swear with his fingers crossed.

Even before Tuesday’s email, the original, outside-the-government Department of Government Efficiency project spearheaded by Musk immediately ran afoul of regulations protecting against corruption that keep our democracy from slipping into an oligarchy. When the administration pivoted to bring the project inside the government, meanwhile, it immediately ran afoul of safeguards against citizen surveillance and privacy protections that keep our democracy from slipping into an autocracy.

Which brings us back to the buyout. Putting aside Musk’s failed promises to Twitter employees who had hoped for a similar buyout, the vision of the federal workforce announced in the email is no more sensible than the TikTok executive order, no more effective at considering governmental protections than the early DOGE efforts. One “pillar” of this supposed new federal workforce presumes the flexible assignment and reassignment of anyone who works for the federal government to whatever task, agency, or group the president wants, whenever he wants. In other words, it assumes that the president can usurp the priority-setting prerogatives exclusive to Congress when it sets its budgets and directs funds toward or away from various mandates.

In another pillar, the vision asserts the president’s right to reclassify federal works to at-will employees. But to do that, he should have to pass new regulations, legislation that would require planning, process, public comment, and (likely) judicial review. And to skip that process, he’d have to revoke the Administrative Procedure Act, a move that should require an act of Congress and (likely) judicial review.

If that sounds like a lot of red tape worth cutting through, think of it this way: If the president can do what this memo suggests he can do to federal workers, then he can do pretty much anything to pretty much anyone at pretty much any time. He can change substantive law on a whim—banking codes, safety regs, union protections, taxes.

These are not the actions of a thoughtful, careful, or competent government. It is not the one envisioned by our founders or present throughout the first nearly two and a half centuries of the American experiment. This is the empty chatter of a bot trained on revenge fantasy scripts that lacks a fourth grader’s understanding of the branches of government and separation of powers.

But, hey, it’s good for grabbing headlines.

And of course, what do you do with a bot you’ve trained to be maximally engaging? You put it behind a paywall, make it a subscription service.