Hello and welcome to Part 2 of the federal government email nonsense, the sequel that none of us wanted and yet received anyway. Elon Musk is nice like that. I know we had a thread about this earlier this week, but I figured I’d give an update.
On Monday, your friendly local federal government employees logged into their computers to discover yet another email. For a re-enactment of the reaction, please allow your mind to drift to the Arrested Development dead dove “I don’t know what I was expecting” reaction image.
Since I had actual work to do, I ignored that email and only glanced at it a few hours later. It purported to be a FAQ; folks on reddit noted, accurately, that it appeared to be trying to respond to critiques posted on reddit. It responded badly.
I have mentioned these emails are unsigned, let me be even more specific. They claim to come from someone named “HR”, whose email is HR at OPM dot gov. There is no signature at the bottom of the email. There is no digital signature on the email.
As far as the email itself is concerned, it may as well come from a 10 year old at the local elementary school who has figured out how to spoof email addresses. This is why we are getting incessant emails from leadership assuring us that the emails are “valid and lawful”.
Sure.
There is a large contingent dutifully marking these emails as phishing; they are both correct and also probably pissing off their local IT office.
But were it not for the internet grapevine and fednews reddit, I would have no idea these emails are coming from Elon Musk & Associates. They seem to be coming out of nowhere and then we get several more emails from leadership that yes these emails are “lawful”, but I have noted several times that leadership never actually says who they come from, how, and why. We’re just supposed to assume this is “HR” at OPM.
Not to belabor the point even more, but HR in the government is never called just “HR”. We might refer to it as “HR” but the organizational group that does HR in our agencies is not known by that two letter acronym.
This week, trying to sleep, I indulge myself by getting philosophical. Why is Elon Musk doing this? What does he gain by attempting (illegally) to destroy the US federal government? I understand why privatization happens; people love to charge folks for what they used to get for free. But what does Musk gain by destroying the FAA? The FSA? The GSA of all places? I don’t understand. It must be an ego thing. Perhaps my lack of understanding is why I’m not a billionaire. I also wasn’t born to billionaires, which is probably the bigger reason I’m not a billionaire. Alas, I must settle for being a low productive federal employee, helping save lives every day.
I do not get the Tuesday emails that some on reddit received; they describe that as a “contract”, aka a word document that was fully editable. The competence of the people sending this out has never been assumed, but at this point, any possible benefit of the doubt must be extinguished. Either that email wasn’t sent to my agency or it was only sent to those who took the offer. Through the week, I do keep hearing that you have to resign in order to see the contract you’re signing. That seems backwards.
Wednesday dawns and with it another Fork In The Road email. This one is long. I skim it. It is trying so, so, so hard to sell us on this “deferred resignation”. At the end, it has a “deferred resignation letter”, which is approximately 8 paragraphs that they should have sent the first time around, where they attempt to explain what this is and what your quitting entails and how that’s going to work. The carrot in all of this is that if you do this, you don’t have to give up telework/remote work, but your resignation is effective at the end of the fiscal year (end of September). So… you’re quitting now and will work for several months anyway. This is a change from what we were previously told, which is you quit now, stop working, but still get paid.
Over and over, the question has been, how “deferred resignation” different from quitting? Why not just quit when you want to quit? Elon Musk & Co keep changing their answers on this. The one bright side of that is their incompetence is one thing that is stopping some people from taking the offer, because the offer is just so bizarre.
This week also features a lot of obfuscating emails from leadership trying to explain things. For instance, we get an email from on high saying that those who take deferred resignation could get VERA (early retirement). Then I attend a town hall where we’re told that VERA has not been approved. Logic would also suggest that since deferred resignation is, y’know, quitting, and quitting is a different thing than retiring, that you cannot quit and then take retirement.
Sidenote on this because I ran into it when dealing with people IRL about this: quitting is different from retiring. When you retire from the federal government, you get benefits. When you quit, you do not. Therefore, saying you can retire after you’ve already quit is a very strange thing to say.
I am lucky (?) in that I have a lot of different leadership types sending me emails so I can see the full gamut of reactions, from cowardice to greatness. The truly best responses have been from those who are doing their best to slow walk everything, making it clear that we’re going to do everything by the book and according to policy, and whoops, turns out they didn’t bother to make policy, so we’re going to wait until they do, because you have to do things properly and make sure we’re complying correctly with everything. These are the folks who have calls where when someone says “I know [specific thing] is not allowed, but what about [tangential thing]?” and they reply “we have not been told tangential thing is not allowed”, subtext: go ahead and do the tangential thing.
And then there are the other emails, which don’t do that. Everyone who parroted the line that DEI is shameful and illegal: I saw that. We all saw that. Everyone who is jumping to pretend trans people don’t exist: I see you, and I am slow walking you.
We are also hearing over and over again that some positions aren’t eligible for deferred resignation. What positions are they? We don’t know. That question comes up over and over again. But we don’t know. You can certainly email “resign” to HR at OPM dot gov, but who is the one making the decision on if you’re allowed to quit or not?
Important to note: everyone is allowed to quit. You just have to quit to your supervisor. OPM, as discussed last week, ain’t your supervisor (unless it is, my continuing condolences to my federal siblings).
But swirling around this “deferred resignation” push is the idea that these positions will not be filled. So if every single doctor at your local VA took the offer, whoops, they’re not going to be filled. In theory. In practice, well, those positions are probably exempt from the hiring freeze. But good luck getting applicants!
They’re trying to destroy the federal government and, hand to god, I really don’t understand why.
This brings us to Thursday, the final day to accept the wonderful offer that is quitting your job with nothing lined up! Because if you don’t quit from us forcing you to quit (forcing someone to quit is illegal), bad things are going to happen! So you must quit while you have the chance! Take our offer OR ELSE.
Thursday’s email is exactly the same as Wednesday’s. Guess they ran out of ideas. Excitement came when I was on a meeting about it this afternoon and someone broke in to say a judge paused the program. Someone followed up “but it’s not extended?” “Guess we’ll find out.”
So did we get an email on Friday, considering the program is paused? Of course we did. Since they are (mercifully) out of clever ideas to insult us, it’s just a retread of the other ones, this time letting us know the offer is extended until 11:59pm on Monday night. This after all the emails assured us the offer would not be extended. But I’m glad someone taught them professionalism. Now if someone could just teach them to move slower and not break things. If toddlers can learn it, so can they.
Quick FAQs:
Q: How is any of this legal?
A: It’s not.
Q: Is there a legal way they could have shrunk the federal government, if that was truly their goal?
A: Yep, they could have just offered VERA from the start and a whole lot of people would have taken it. It has eligibility requirements, though, and it doesn’t let you be needlessly cruel to millions of people or close USAID. There are also Reduction In Force (RIF) but those have, drum roll please, an actual process that must be followed.
Q: Is anyone taking this “deal”?
A: We don’t know. Last week, I heard some fears from supervisors that 40-50% of GS-6 and below staff would take the deal, based on what they were hearing at their meetings. The logic is that GS-6 and below folks get paid so little, that if they could quit and stop working now and keep getting paid until September, and they were sure they could get another job in the meanwhile, that this would be a really good offer for those who wanted to take it. The changing of the “deal” this week to be “actually you quit now but you work until September, or we fire you tomorrow and you don’t get paid at all” might change things, it might not, but it’s unclear if you can take back that “resign” email you sent.
There’s also the remote folks who truly cannot return to the office — and the offices also don’t have space for them. There’s talk of exemptions for remote work for folks they like or can be convinced to like (aka military spouses). But for many remote folks, this is a very scary situation: they took a remote job on purpose. The only way they are being allowed to see to not have to return to the office is to resign, either normally or through this process. And this process, in theory, might pay them (it won’t pay them).
Q: Are people already being told that they can’t put a fork in this road?
A: Yes, we’re starting to get some guidance from our leadership on the exempted professions, aka even if you told Elon Musk you’re quitting, you’re not actually quitting.
Q: Do you, personally, believe anyone will get paid through this process?
A: No.
