Federal workers are getting a buyout offer that private-sector workers could only dream of during a restructuring of their workplace.
. . . is the right of federal employees to work from home. Or, at least, that’s what we’re about to hear from the public-sector unions and their media cheerleaders for the next little while as the Trump administration tries to order bureaucrats to show up at the office.
On the first day of the new administration, President Trump issued a one-paragraph memorandum:
Heads of all departments and agencies in the executive branch of Government shall, as soon as practicable, take all necessary steps to terminate remote work arrangements and require employees to return to work in-person at their respective duty stations on a full-time basis, provided that the department and agency heads shall make exemptions they deem necessary.
Then, on Tuesday, the Office of Personnel Management, which oversees the federal workforce, sent an email to federal employees saying, “The substantial majority of federal employees who have been working remotely since Covid will be required to return to their physical offices five days a week.” It presented federal workers with a choice: Either do that, or resign. If they choose to resign on or before February 6, they will “retain all pay and benefits regardless of your daily workload and will be exempted from all applicable in-person work requirements until September 30, 2025.”
As anyone who has ever lost their job from a reorganization plan knows, this is an incredibly generous offer, one that most workers, even well-paid ones, do not receive. Federal workers who accept the deferred resignation offer do not have to work at all from now until September 30 and will still receive full pay and benefits. OPM explains to employees that it is making this offer because “the federal workforce is expected to undergo significant near-term changes” and that, as a result of those changes, “you may wish to depart the federal government on terms that provide you with sufficient time and economic security to plan for your future—and have a nice vacation.”
If you’re wondering how anyone could possibly think this is a bad offer to employees in an organization that is restructuring, you have to remember that there is no group of people on the planet more entitled, more spoiled, and more disconnected from reality than unionized federal employees. And the media will be more than happy to relay their sob stories to make them out to be oppressed.
The good folks over at NPR have already started doing so. “Trump wants federal workers back the office, meaning longer days and added expenses,” the headline reads for a story from Monday. Mind you, that’s not longer days or added expenses for the government. It means longer days and added expenses for workers, who will have to, you know, go to work.
Get a load of this:
SCOTT MAUCIONE, BYLINE: It takes Lane (ph) 20 minutes to drive to the train station in Baltimore.
LANE: The train ride is anywhere from about 40 minutes to an hour. I wake up at 4:10 in the morning and I get to work bright and early between about 6:00 and 6:15.
MAUCIONE: Lane’s a Federal employee and works in-person two days a week, a common setup for some Federal workers. NPR is only using her middle name because she fears speaking out about the new telework policies may jeopardize her job. Lane says she works those two in-person days back-to-back, finishing up at the office around 3:00 p.m. and getting back home around 5:00.
LANE: You know, I’m so exhausted at the end of the day. By that third morning when I’m, you know, waking up and teleworking, I am just so brain dead. It’s actually hard to focus that next day. I cannot imagine trying to get in the car and go in a third day.
To recap, the burden that Lane “cannot imagine” having to bear more than two times a week is a roughly hour-and-a-half commute, most of which is done on a train where she can take a nap, read a book, or play solitaire on her phone. And she has to tell this harrowing tale from the cover of anonymity, as though she’s some kind of dissident in a communist country in fear of the secret police breaking down the door at any moment.
In reality, this deferred resignation offer is designed for people like Lane. She says she moved from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore and is pretty firmly established in her new community. “Moving back to the DC area is not something that’s particularly financially feasible,” she said. Great news: The federal government is offering to give her full pay and benefits for the next eight months while she finds a new job closer to home.
Whether it’s a good idea to get more workers in the office is more of an open question, and this reorganization effort could fail. The real problem with growth of government is not the number of federal employees, which is roughly the same today as it was in 1970, but rather the increase in state and local government employees, unconstrained growth of regulations, and out-of-control deficit spending.
But if the president wants executive-branch employees to come to the office five days a week, they need to come to the office five days a week. The Constitution says the president runs the executive branch.
The problem right now is that federal workers and their unions currently believe that they run the executive branch. Some of them are suing OPM for having the nerve to email them all at once. “Between the flurry of anti-worker executive orders and policies, it is clear that the Trump administration’s goal is to turn the federal government into a toxic environment where workers cannot stay even if they want to,” American Federation of Government Employees president Everett Kelley said after the deferred resignation program was announced.
Federal workers are getting a buyout offer that private-sector workers could only dream of during a restructuring of their workplace. If they want to act like oppressed victims about it, they can go ahead and pout, but they shouldn’t expect any sympathy from the public.