Anxiety mounts as U.S. government workers face buyout deadline

The future of millions of federal workers was plunged into another day of chaos Thursday as they faced fresh uncertainty over an unprecedented program pushing financial incentives in exchange for quitting their jobs.

All they’d need to do, the Trump administration told them, was reply to an email with the word “resign” in the subject line. As many fretted over the 11:59 p.m. ET deadline to make a potentially life-altering decision, a federal judge stepped in with a temporary reprieve — there would be a block on the program pending a hearing on Monday.

Then came the memo.

Sent from the acting director to government agency heads, the acting director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management directed them to turn over information about any employees who have had poor performance reviews over the last three years.

Their employer, he said, was “developing new performance metrics for evaluating the federal workforce that aligns with the priorities and standards” of President Donald Trump.

Adding to the anxiety, the workers who decide to remain in their jobs could still be dismissed at a later date as the White House seeks to trim as much as 10% of the workforce in a sweeping push to shrink and remake the federal bureaucracy — an effort that is being led in part by one of Trump’s top advisers, billionaire Elon Musk, and his Department of Government Efficiency. It also remains unclear whether the terms of the offer will be honored.

Trump administration officials have presented the dramatic downsizing effort as a way to save taxpayer money and tried to sell it to workers as a good deal: quit working while still collecting salaries and receiving benefits until Sept. 30. That’s according to a memo from the OPM, effectively the human resources department for the federal workforce.

In an interview Thursday, an IRS employee who is based in Texas said he had decided to accept the buyout “because of the fear I would be fired regardless.”

“The culture has changed so much in such a short amount of time,” said the IRS worker, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared retribution. “Employees are demoralized. Some new hires cried at their desks.” He said one employee who had moved to Texas for his position wept in a men’s bathroom.

An employee at the Commerce Department who lives in the Southwestern U.S. said they accepted the offer to resign out of fear they would not be able to continue working from their home far from the nation’s capital.

“By walking away, I feel like I’m abandoning my colleagues, and that’s a weight I hate carrying,” the worker said. “This was a choice I felt forced to make. What’s nagging me is the suspicion that this is all a scam. There was very little in terms of official documentation or assurances that I will continue to be paid through September or that I will retain or be reimbursed for my retirement contributions. It’s a pretty scary situation.”

Trump administration officials have turned the deferred resignation offer into a formalized contract, a copy of which was sent to Justice Department employees and shared with NBC News.

The contract lays out the terms of the separation, which includes a clause stating the employee was not coerced into signing the agreement. Democratic lawmakers and federal employee unions have cautioned workers against accepting the offers, saying in part that they are legally questionable and not authorized by Congress.

Before the sun even rose in the nation’s capital Thursday, an email once again went out widely to federal employees prompting them to resign. The email, carrying the subject line “Final Day Fork in the Road,” cautioned workers that “there will not be an extension of this program.”

The so-called “Fork in the Road” resembles an ultimatum that Musk sent employees when he took control of Twitter (now known as X) and told them to make a choice: stay and work in an “extremely hardcore” environment — or head to the exits with severance.

In a message to Education Department employees Wednesday, the American Federation of Government Employees called the resignation package pitched by the Trump administration “eerily similar to the situation at Twitter, where employees are still suing Elon Musk for severance pay promised under his own ‘Fork in the Road’ offers.’ … We must not fall for the same trap.”

More than 60,000 workers had already accepted what’s formally known as a “deferred resignation” as of Thursday afternoon, according to a senior administration official.

But large numbers of federal workers intended on resisting the mounting pressure and staying put. More than a dozen employees who spoke to NBC News in the last week said they were not even considering taking the offer.