Largest Mass Resignation in US History as 100k Federal Workers Quit

The deferred retirement scheme is an incredibly ill-conceived way of shrinking the government. The way the incentive is structured it encourages the workers who are most able to find another job to leave. These are your best workers. The ones that will disproportionately stay are the least competitive in the job market. The other group of workers that will take it are those that were going to leave or retire anyway. So, for them its a waste of money and the transfer of their knowledge is cut short.

The same goes for the other DOGE employment initiative of firing probationary employees. These are mostly either people you have just hired or those that have been promoted. Of course, these are the employees you would most want to keep.

It was voluntary on paper, but there was a clear threat that if you didn't take it there was a good chance you would be fired with no severance. Whether this threat was implicit or explicit depended on what department you were in.

Source: Federal workers I know personally, and numerous public statements from DOGE officials and cabinet secretaries when this offer was made.

> “The reality is clear: A large-scale reduction, in response to the President’s workforce executive orders, is already happening. The government is restructuring, and unfortunately, many employees will later realize they missed a valuable, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” the official said.

- https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/04/politics/trump-administration...

I'm not terrified. Just to put some perspective on this, per Pew [1], the federal workforce excluding the postal service (which has actually shrunk as a semi-private employer) has grown by about 1% per year since 2000. As of 2024, it was at 2.4M people. The federal workforce is dramatically bigger than it was even a few years ago [2].

Moreover, the vast majority of federal workers don't have anything to do with the kind of consumer-facing services that people think of when they think "government". More than half of all federal employees comprise: the Defense departments (Army, Navy, DoD, etc.), the Department of Homeland Security and the VA [3].

The federal workforce continues to get bigger and bigger, there's absolutely no practical incentive to stop it, and congress has abjectly failed to do its job in controlling the budget.

To be clear, this is not the right way to reduce the size of the federal government, but I'm not "terrified" of losing 100k employees in a government of this size. We need more cutting, not less.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/01/07/what-the-...

[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/01/07/what-the-...

[3] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/01/07/what-the-...

I recommend _Culture in Nazi Germany_ by Michael H. Kater. [1]

Propaganda was the control they wanted. 3rd party companies and organizations allowed for a pseud disconnect with the shared propaganda. See this paper, music group, artist supports our ideology and we are not paying them for it.

Centrally controlled does not mean being centrally employed. Just take a look at all the big businesses that assisted fascism for financial gain. Lot of it being slave labor. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_involved_in_....

[1] https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300253375/culture-in-naz...

* Added link to the book.

There are two elements of this situation that I'm consistently trying to open-mindedly hold in balance.

One part is what I call "The Great Defederalization". In a myriad of ways, the federal state that was erected between FDR and LBJ is being torn down. That state existed on a group of decisions that allowed independent agencies outside of the direct oversight of the president: the Humphrey's Executor agencies, NLRB, FCC, FTC. The Supreme Court and Congress are very happy to work on rolling them back, and they were constructed on pretty awful jurisprudence to begin with. That can work-- we should engage in creative destruction, the administrative state did restrict economic growth, and it did create carve-outs out of the Constitution. If it made us a more reliable partner, that did come at the cost of flexibility.

But at the same time, this executive isn't defederalizing to defer power to the states-- it's doing it to grant more immediate power to the president, who is in effect weaponizing the armed forces and police forces against non-compliant localities and personal enemies. News like this happening the same week as the president sends the Army to a passive American city in order to plainly provoke a conflict, and directing his DoJ to enact a case on paper thin justification, is troubling, to say the least.