Federal agencies have accelerated their efforts to cut thousands of jobs, offering buyouts and eliminating entire offices as the Trump administration’s deadline to downsize approaches.
At least six federal agencies have in recent days extended a “deferred resignation” offer that was originally pitched to government workers in January as a one-time opportunity that would allow employees to resign but continue to be paid for a period of time.
The latest offer was sent to employees at the Departments of Agriculture, Defense, Energy, Housing and Urban Development and Transportation, as well as the General Services Administration, according to emails received by workers at those agencies reviewed by The New York Times.
Employees at those agencies have to make their decisions between Monday, April 7, and April 11, depending on the agency, the emails said.
President Trump and his top adviser on downsizing the government, Elon Musk, have ordered nearly every agency to reduce staff on a tight deadline to overhaul the government, in part by eliminating programs the president views as ideologically objectionable. Mr. Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency have promised significant savings to American taxpayers as a result, though wages and benefits for the federal work force amount to just 4.3 percent of the $6.3 trillion federal budget, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Mr. Trump has given Mr. Musk wide latitude to effect change, empowering him to effectively shutter agencies.
Already, tens of thousands of workers have been fired or taken an earlier buyout offer. And agencies have said even more layoffs are to come. Two federal offices, Management and Budget and Personnel Management, ordered agencies to produce detailed plans for what is being called a “reduction in force” by April 14.
Early Tuesday morning, the Department of Health and Human Services fired thousands of workers, in some cases eliminating entire departments, as part of this plan. Last week, the department announced it would layoff 10,000 employees. For some, the news arrived when they arrived to the office and their building badges no longer worked.
Senior leaders and scientists were dismissed, too, leaving outside experts and former officials dismayed by what they said was an immeasurable loss of expertise.
Reductions in force have specific steps that if not followed could open up the administration to additional legal challenges on top of the more than 200 cases it is already fighting.
The agencies that moved to reopen a voluntary resignation program noted in the emails to employees that they were trying to give workers more opportunities to leave so fewer would have to be fired.
Mr. Trump has said he feels bad that so many federal workers are losing their jobs, but he has insisted without evidence that many of the people on the government’s payroll “don’t work at all.” Administration officials, including the health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have insisted that the reductions will save taxpayers significant sums of money.
Max Stier, the president of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit that promotes best practices in government, questioned the administration’s reasoning, pointing out that the savings that might come from job cuts amount to a fraction of the government’s overall spending.
At the health department, for example, less than 1 percent of its spending goes to staff.
“There is no strategy here,” Mr. Stier said. “What we are watching is a devaluing of expertise, and that is a profound mistake.”
In one blow, the health department cut entire offices, including ones that study diseases and environmental problems, a vaccine research program aimed at preventing the next pandemic, and veterinarians leading the agency’s response to bird flu. Some senior leaders were reassigned to the Indian Health Service, a division with offices in far more remote parts of the country than the Washington, D.C., region.
As health employees comforted each other through tears on Tuesday, Mr. Kennedy posted a video on social media that showed him swearing in two new agency heads. “The revolution begins today,” he said.
Federal firings began soon after Mr. Trump returned to the Oval Office, at first targeting people who had been hired into designated diversity, equity and inclusion positions in a push to eliminate all such programs across the government. But those cuts were nothing compared with what was to come.
In January, millions of federal employees were offered a buyout of sorts in an email with the subject line “Fork in the Road.” The message came from the Office of Personnel Management, the government’s human resources arm, which had not until this year sent mass emails to government employees. The email mirrored one Mr. Musk sent to Twitter employees after he purchased the social media platform, which is now called X.
About 75,000 people took the first offer, according to the office. Those who accepted it were told to reply to the email with the word “resign” in the subject line.
In February, the Office of Personnel Management directed agencies to fire thousands of probationary employees — workers who were in their position for less than a year or two years and lacked the civil service protections of those who had been in their jobs longer. Court challenges have led to the reinstatement of most of the fired probationary workers, though many are in limbo on administrative leave and expect to be fired again in the next phase of layoffs now underway.
The latest deferred resignation offer was sent to employees directly from their individual agencies, rather than the Office of Personnel Management.
In some of the new offers, employees were told that they can expect another email from their human resources division to walk them through the process of accepting the offer.
The Transportation Department told employees that if they accepted the offer, they would not be subjected to an “involuntary separation, such as a reduction-in-force.”
In recent weeks, some agencies have been encouraging employees to retire or take early retirement, with the goal of having to fire fewer people.
“It is the DOD’s goal to avoid widespread involuntary reductions in force,” Zev Goldrich, the acting head of civilian personnel policy at the Defense Department, wrote in a mid-March memo to employees. Then on March 29, Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, offered another round of deferred resignations.
When the original deferred resignation offer arrived, many viewed it as a frontal assault on the federal bureaucracy. Still, some employees who did not accept it at the time have since expressed regret.
This is the case for one senior official at the Homeland Security Department who was recently placed on administrative leave as part of job cuts that gutted three of its watchdog agencies last month. The official said that in hindsight he wished he had accepted the offer.
Initially, the employee said, he was skeptical about whether the offer was real and if the new administration would honor the agreement and pay him. The employee spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution while he is still on the agency’s payroll.
In addition to the firings and resignation offers, Mr. Trump called on Jan. 20 for a blanket return to in-government-office work. He has said that the order will likely lead to people resigning rather than upending their daily routines. “And therefore our government will get smaller and more efficient,” Mr. Trump said on Jan. 29.
The constant threat of getting fired weighs heavily on many federal employees. And other blunt orders from Mr. Musk’s team have led to federal workers scrambling to complete tasks far outside their job descriptions, such as cleaning bathrooms. Workers have described a decrease in productivity as a result.
The latest offer of deferred resignations will only add to the chaos, Mr. Stier said.
“It will get worse and worse,” he said.
Brad Plumer, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Sarah Kliff and Madeleine Ngo contributed reporting.
