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.

“I’m not giving in no matter how many emails were sent today hounding us,” one employee at Veterans Affairs said earlier this week.

An employee at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency struck a similar chord: “The offer and those that are offering it assume that a large enough portion of the federal workforce is motivated primarily by money. While salary is important, we are driven by our commitment to the mission to protect our country and by our oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Still, large swaths of workers remain unsure how to proceed. In an interview, a human resources supervisor under the Department of Health and Human Services said she was “on the fence about the buyout and may take it.” The sense of fear and confusion was rampant across her workplace; one colleague “called me yesterday for an hour crying, trying to decide and overwhelmed” about whether to accept the proposal from the OPM, she said.

The human resources supervisor — who, like many federal workers who spoke to NBC News, asked not to be named — said she was worried the Trump administration’s aggressive push to cut down the federal workforce and remake the architecture of the national government could create lasting harm.

“Everyone is saying, ‘This isn’t legal.’ But ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether it is. The entire system is being broken with no consequences.”

Shelly, an information systems security manager who asked that her last name and government agency not be specified, said she thought the first buyout email in her inbox might be junk because it looked unprofessional.

“The very first message that came out, I thought it was spam,” Shelly told “NBC Nightly News” this week. “I thought it was a phishing message, and a lot of people thought the same thing. … I’m the information security person, and we basically sent it to our security operations center because it did not look like normal information we get from OPM. It looks so unofficial.”

At the General Services Administration, which handles real estate and building services for the federal government, one employee said Wednesday the pressure to resign was unlike anything he previously experienced at a workplace.

“Every two, three hours, we’re getting these messages telling us to resign or face consequences,” the GSA employee said. “And we had staff meetings yesterday afternoon and this morning, and we were told, basically, not enough people have taken the resignation offer, therefore they’re going to go ahead and start looking to implement reductions in force.”

“And they just keep telling us, ‘take the offer to leave’ and ‘take the offer to leave,’” the person added. “That it’s a better offer than what’s coming down the line.”

In at least one instance, federal workers were notified about the “fork in the road” just days before the deadline. National Security Agency employees received emails offering a voluntary early retirement option on Tuesday night, according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter.

In a subsequent town hall meeting with the director of the agency Wednesday, staff members did not get much clarity on whether people who accept the offer would receive the benefits and pensions to which they’re entitled.

In the case of at least one federal agency, employees have reason to suspect the government will not hold up its end of the buyout bargain.

Top officials at the Education Department told staff members Wednesday that if they say yes to the administration’s deferred resignation package, Trump’s education secretary may later cancel it — leaving employees without any recourse and potentially depriving them of promised pay.

It was not immediately clear whether that caveat applied to other federal agencies.

In responses to requests for comment, spokespeople for the Education Department and the OPM pointed to a memo that said the resignation offer’s “assurances are binding on the government. Were the government to backtrack on its commitments, an employee would be entitled to request a rescission of his or her resignation.”

However, the memo includes a sample agreement that has a clause saying the agency heads can rescind the deals — and that employees waive the right to challenge them in front of the Merit Systems Protection Board, an independent agency that reviews federal workers’ claims, “or any other forum.”

A sample agreement circulated among Education Department employees, obtained by NBC News, included similar language and stipulated that taking the resignation offer is final.

In response to the federal judge’s pause on the buyout program, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said: “We are grateful to the Judge for extending the deadline so more federal workers who refuse to show up to the office can take the Administration up on this very generous, once-in-a-lifetime offer.”