75K federal workers accepted 'deferred resignation' offer | Hacker News Reader

75K federal workers accepted 'deferred resignation' offer

nbcnews.com

29 pointsgeox63 comments

Many don't believe that the money is forthcoming. They're aware that this is coming from two individuals both famous for backing out of obligations.

But if you were in a company whose management said, explicitly, that they hate you, then getting out early would surely be better than waiting. Maybe you'll get something extra, but just getting out might be enough.

Unfortunately, getting your next job won't be easy. A lot of government workers are in Maryland and Northern Virginia. You'll be competing for new jobs with tens of thousands of other job seekers. And it's not just them; government contracts and service companies will also dry up.

So you leave. Which is, of course, giving them what they want, which must be even more galling. But the American people literally voted that they hate you, and you have to live with that.

>But the American people literally voted that they hate you, and you have to live with that.

Why does it have to be hate/personal? I can lay off a employee without hating them.

Let's use the word "disdain". I don't think the majority of voters have disdain for federal workers, but the people engaging in these actions certainly seem to.

The disdain I can personally speak to is with the system that creates job programs funded by my taxpayer dollars instead of using said dollars for effective governance. I have lived experience, lots of it, with people who are living stereotypes of government employees, whose entire work product serves to sustain a self-perpetuating bureaucracy and who contribute very little to the statutory mission of their employer. So do many other people.

I don't blame those employees for thriving in the environment that was created for them. I don't wish them any ill. But I don't think I need to fund that kind of systemic dysfunction anymore.

Do you really have faith in Elon "print out your source code so I can personally read it" Musk to accurately weed out the bad eggs while maintaining effective governance? What evidence do you have that Trump is at all interested in effective governance? All I see is him creating systemic dysfunction, not ending any.

> But the American people literally voted that they hate you, and you have to live with that.

No, the American people voted for 156 million+ individual reasons, to include inflation, the economy, and all the other kitchen-table reasons one votes. To be sure, some subset of them are hateful people. But come on.

They stood on the ruble of burned children at Waco to pose in glamour photos, sniped an innocent woman at Ruby Ridge, and drone striked a US citizen overseas.

Hate is not unreasonable .

Who is "they"? It seems a little extreme to blame 75k plus federal employees for government actions of decades past.

They as in a number of federal employees responsible, often hated.

I don't blame all of them, but the feds themselves set the standard of blaming the whole organization for violence eg rico act. It is hard to blame haters when they apply the principles used by government to prosecute them.

Uhh . . . what? The entire point of RICO is to prosecute organizations that are literally arranged for criminal purposes. It was designed to go after the mafia dons who gave the orders to kill people and do gangland stuff, but then had a bunch of henchmen to do the dirty work.

There's not just RICO, conspiracy and stuff like felony murder all put the whole organization who make violence happen on the chopping block.

Of course this organizational blame is enough to put citizens in a cage but by God the citizens ought not hate government employees for their organizations use of a little extrajudicial violence.

Based

> American people literally voted

This is so commonly repeated now it’s an effective means of damping down any notion that Americans can actively dissent and blunt the excesses of this administration.

I get that Trump is doing exactly what he said he was going to do, but he also simultaneously said he wasn’t going to do the same things. The margin of victory was narrow enough that what comes next is a test of Americans’ ability to resist and defend.

It’s not about “what Americans voted for”. It’s about which Americans made it through the gates, and who last moved those gates.

Also, if Americans voted for Trump to do a fascism, because Trump said he would do a fascism, and then Trump did a fascism... it's still legitimate to oppose fascism. "This is what (about half of the people who bothered to vote) voted for" doesn't mean everyone else just has to go home and sit on their hands.

Some of those people who accepted were told they could not accept it, this is really shabbily done.

https://www.npr.org/2025/02/14/nx-s1-5296910/trump-federal-w...

> American people literally voted that they hate you

I didn't vote for this, speak for yourself.

Technically Americans collectively (as a nation with specific values and culture) made this happened.

Democrats are run by Corporates.

Americans love capitalism and would brand anything else (even by a slight mentioned of certain aspect) as socialists and or communism and get cancelled.

Cutting tax is an example. Thinking tax is too high is another example.

I think that, on the contrary, government contracts will increase. There will be increased privatization of government services. These services cannot cease, but they will cease to be performed by the government. I imagine government contractors like Palantir will actually do quite well. A smaller government is good for business due to privatization, but perhaps more often bad for people subject to those businesses with less government oversight.

I assume most of tgese are early retirements

> But if you were in a company whose management said, explicitly, that they hate you, then getting out early would surely be better than waiting.

The government is not a company and its current “custodians” are not its owners.

Fun fact that a lot of people find surprising: the US federal government was already at or near its smallest size (headcount per capita) in American history.

It’s honestly shocking that so many public services work under such resource-constrained conditions at all.

That's an interesting metric. Do you have a citation?

It's just the bare facts from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This WP article has a graph -- basically, at its height (the New Deal/WWII) the federal workforce was about 7% of the workforce and have been going downward since then to about 2% today.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/02/12/federal-w...

Thanks, interesting. I wonder how much of that is the progression of women entering the workforce. It's quite a specific metric to use.

I suspect a fair bit of it is the elimination of Federal make-work programs established during the New Deal.

IMO that's a poor measurement of "government size". Not that I have a better one though. But it doesn't account for technology or scaling.

I also like expenditures as % GDP. It was generally far below 5% federally during non-war periods between civil war and ww1, and for most that time no income tax for regular workers. We also had pretty solid growth in that period, pretty close to that of the post WW2 boom.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GjNDwxtXwAAYvL5?format=png&name=...

It indicates that reducing headcount is almost certainly a poor way to "increase efficiency."

Im curious in which ways is that a valuable way to look at it, opposed to headcount per road mile, land managed, package delivered, ect? I would expect some reduction in headcount required as we dont need to hand sort every letter, ect.

In a different way of looking at it, federal taxes have outgrown inflation by 10x if you benchmark 1950. In what area are 10X more services provided, and in what areas are 1X services provided.

I've always been perplexed at the assumption that federal spending should track GDP.

Lots of things. Neither Medicare (1965) nor Medicaid (1965), which provide healthcare to millions of impoverished, disabled, and elderly people, didn't exist in 1950. Nor did NASA (1958) and the US space program. The NSF (1950) which funds most non-biomedical research in the US, was founded in that year, and while the NIH technically existed in 1950, it was mostly just the research institute in Maryland, not the funding agency it also comprises today. DARPA (1957), the defense research and funding agency that among other things created the ancestor of the very network you are using to post here, also didn't exist. You could go on and on.

We don't need to sort every letter but we need to deliver them by hand. And packages, etc.

How many people are required to run the government compared to the size of the population they serve is absolutely a valid metric and makes tons of sense. Not only comparable historically but also across countries.

Per Capita is per person, not GDP btw.

I obviously know what per capita means.

My point is interrogating the domains where that metric is useful and isn't. Are we delivering 10x more letters per capita? Does US mail sent use scale with GDP per capita?

In many areas I would expect a 1:1 relation with population, but not GDP. For example, I would expect primary education cost to scale at with population (eg teachers and schools per student). If cost per student has gone up 10x instead, why is that?

This is surprising to me, but I also wonder how contractors factor into the equation.

To naively soapbox for a second, I don't know much about public policy, but I have a persistent hunch that a lot of the "government inefficiency" comes down to the obsession with hiring contractors for everything. While I know some people in gov't contracting and they do good work (and definitely faster than I've seen get done in federal agencies proper), there has to be so much inefficiency in the whole process, so many unnecessary layers added on.

It's one explanation (albeit obviously an incomplete one) I've heard for how we used to, say, build infrastructure so quickly, even for all the flaws that had - in Robert Moses' time, when the government wanted to build something, they would go down to their office full of engineers and draftsmen and get it sketched out within the week. Now they have to go through a whole process of hiring a contractor for design, then construction, etc, etc...

Anecdata: here in California, when CalTrans needs road work done in a hurry, e.g. disaster recovery, they bring on contractors that are paid bonuses for completing their jobs speedily (hooray, incentives). When time is less of a factor, they do the work themselves.

This is the key point, most of the waste comes from contractors who can navigate the insane contracting process and the fact that we’ve brain drained the federal government to the point that the Feds just take whatever contractors say as gospel.

Cutting federal employees further isn’t touching the primary problem at all.

>The number of federal employees who are reported to have taken the offer amounts to less than 5% of the federal workforce.

>In fiscal year 2023, the attrition rate of the federal workforce was 5.9%, according to the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit organization that promotes government service.

Sounds like most of this is people who were already thinking of leaving.

Annual attrition goals met by February. Ahead of schedule

This is less then the number of people who retire from the federal government every year. I would expect a significant number of these people to be people who were going to retire anyway and want get out a few months early:

https://www.opm.gov/retirement-center/retirement-statistics/

One effect of this is that some people accepting this offer have a lot of institutional knowledge that can't be found anywhere else. They're talking about people lights going out because of resignations at my regional electric company.

It's got to be a tough spot to be in to accept an offer that might be illegal.

Not an easy position to be in / unfair.

And if the government doesn’t pay up, what happens to the ex-employee? Spend years in court?

This is how bad rich people win: don't pay up, fight in court with their legals that is already in the payroll.

This is how the government wins*

if you want to get mad, get mad at the RTO orders

in almost every case, these folks seems to be remote workers who can't/won't comply with RTO so they are taking a payout

I am a dev who took a remote job with the US gov a few years ago.

My options are:

- Tear up my life in my hometown and relocate my family closer to an office so I can go there and do zoom calls

- Take this deal

I struggled with this, and ultimately took the deal. I know it might be a scam. But at this point I know I will eventually be laid off for refusing to relocate. Neither option is good, and making this choice was one of the most stressful experiences of my life.

At the end of the day, we (the citizenry) cannot afford to stay in debt. It makes our country weak.

The total of all federal employees salary is only 4.3% of the budget. If you want to balance the budget using cuts you would have to make significant cuts to all of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Military. These, along with net interest, are not only the largest areas of the budget, but also the ones increasing their share of the budget.

The biggest difference between the balanced budget of the 90s and today is the two large tax cuts pass by Bush and Trump. The reason you probably don't feel that you are paying significant less is because the lion's share of these cuts went to corporations and the upper class. As evidence by the expanding wealth inequality and share of corporate taxes.

> At the end of the day, we (the citizenry) cannot afford to stay in debt. It makes our country weak.

Are you then opposed to the administration’s proposed tax cuts? Won’t that negatively impact the ability for the government to pay down its debt?

No to the second question. The theory is to the extent that tax cuts stimulate the economy, the continued and/or increased growth that enables is better than the alternative of a crash or stagnation. You may argue that all the cuts go to the wealthy, but this is false, and even if they did, which they do not, the stimulus effect is still real.

Now you can buy that theory, or not. Some people may bet on flying pink unicorns, and it’s your right to bet against Milton Friedman if you wish. But the people in charge are going by the theory of people like Milton.

Ah... The trickle down economy.

That theory is what created Billionaires (and Oligarchs) that are rulling USA.

My concern with these tax cuts is that they won’t stimulate the economy because they’re too biased toward people who won’t spend the money. A large tax cut on lower and middle classes would stimulate the economy since the money would be spent.

It does seem to be a complicated calculus.

At small scale, I come from a depressed Midwestern area.

They lowered/cut property taxes but only for rich corporations like Amazon, to bring them in. End result was massive increase in employment (like going from cornfields to warehouses everywhere) and wealth for locals, in a way that cutting for the middle class would not have done.

From an egalitarian standpoint I would prefer flattish taxes but from a practical perspective in my hometown regressive taxes have led to more prosperity. Although lots of billionaires are pure parasites, they're also often the ones making the largest capital investments and using tax and access to flow of capital to decide where to put it.

You’re describing targeted tax breaks and incentives as industrial development policy, which can work. I’m talking about broad tax cuts for the rich, including those in areas that do not have such problems.

These tax cuts are apparently to be paid for by deficit spending, which is insane. There is no way you could cut enough from the US budget to pay for them without winding down the entire US military and cutting things like Medicare and social security that people have paid into their entire lives. That’s wrong, and will cause riots.

Quebec Amazon warehouse recently was about to form Union and Amazon decided to shutdown the facility, citing other random reasons.

Suddenly 1700 jobs are lost.

Amazon is known to have cutthroat model be it internal warehouse and delivery employees or third party (they monitor third party delivery like a hawk monitoring its lunch).

I'm hoping there's a middle option where Government tax the super rich and stimulate local economies by creating infrastructure jobs.

> No to the second question. The theory..

You answered “no” but then postulated a theory. Asking earnestly - what is the evidence that tax cuts have led directly to debt decreases?

Your weasel words (“directly”) indicate there’s no possibility of a satisfactory response for you so I’ll just note that it’s not so much debt decreases as decreases in the rate of debt growth, with the idea being that if the growth of the economy can outpace the growth of the debt, that’s better than the alternative. Let’s at least get the framing right.

I used “directly” because I am looking for evidence supporting the cause and effect relationship between tax cuts, such as those proposed by the current administration, and net positive debt effects (or increased government revenue). It’s a theory I find plausible but it isn’t convincing if it’s not supported by evidence. I figured you might have some particular evidence or metrics that convinced you.

If you're looking for examples in the real world, there are going to be multiple variables mixed in, such as spending cuts. If you want pure evidence, you could write a basic software simulation incorporating just the variables you earnestly want to understand the effects of.

In some ways debt can make us stronger. We issue bonds which the entire world wants to buy. This isn't like your household credit card debt. This is debt that fuels growth and investment in the United States. Partially, because of this we don't have to carry reserves of foreign currency or peg our dollar to another country. I don't know what the right amount is but low interest rates indicate the market does not consider this amount of debt to be problematic.

A better question is: what are we getting for our spending as a nation? Rather than pearl clutching at the amount.

What percentage of our spending going to service the national debt (in other words, to pay interest on the debt) would be too high for you, in your estimation?

Ideally zero. Deficit spending is really only excusable when it is being spent on investments that will offset the future cost.

Otherwise it is simply impoverishing future generations to benefit voters today, often enriching a small subset.

By way of example, going into debt get an education or buy a tractor might make sense. Going into debt to throw a party doesn't, especially when you plan to stick the cosigners with it.

In 2024 federal debt interest was 1.1 Trillion, with 4.9 trillion taxes, that is about 22% of revenue. Most of that interest goes into the pocket of wealthy US and foreign lenders.

Exactly. Person I was asking didn't seem to have a limit.

Yeah so tax the rich.

USA is so brainwashed that their brand of capitalism is the only way to go to Heaven that a slight mention of tax is taboo.

You have shittons of debts and continue to pile more because y'all subscribe to the Religion of Tax less invented by The Rich.

I always dislike talking to fellow Americans who would label any slight of divergent from capitalism as socialism. There's a frigging middle ground...

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