Washington
CNN
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In less than three weeks, President Donald Trump and Elon Musk have upended the federal workforce, firing top officials, grinding billion-dollar agencies to a halt and convincing tens of thousands of workers to voluntarily leave their jobs.
And they say they’re just getting started.
The Musk-led hostile takeover of the federal workforce has been applauded by Trump supporters. But it has sparked chaos, fear, anger – and multiple lawsuits – from federal workers targeted by a Trump administration aiming to shrink the federal government and remove any elements Trump and his allies claim are hostile to the president.
Some of the most sweeping changes attempted have been stymied by the courts – at least for now. A federal judge paused a Thursday deadline for the so-called buyout offer while more proceedings on the program’s legality played out. That followed earlier federal court rulings halting a sweeping federal spending freeze and limiting Musk allies’ access to a highly sensitive payment system at the Treasury Department.
Still, Musk’s moves have come at a dizzying pace, from demanding access to sensitive payment systems and government personal data to the dismantling of the US Agency for International Development, where most of the agency’s employees are being placed on leave and ordered to return to the US.
The turmoil inside the government through the first 19 days of the Trump presidency has shown how an empowered Musk – who took a sledgehammer to Twitter’s workforce when he bought the social media site – has been able to make unprecedented moves inside the federal bureaucracy. Those who have attempted to resist the hand-picked employees Musk installed at DOGE have been swiftly swept aside.
Some of the biggest potential impacts of Musk’s newly created Department of Government Efficiency have come from the Trump administration’s “buyout,” or deferred resignation, offer to most of the federal workforce, which the Trump administration says will allow them to leave their jobs but be paid through the end of September. The memo sent to 2 million federal workers making the offer was titled “Fork in the Road” – the same subject line emailed to Twitter employees in 2022.
On Thursday night, hours after the judge paused the effort, a White House official said at least 65,000 people had opted in to the deferred resignation program, which is roughly 3% of the workers who received the offer.
The White House has said its reduction target is deeper – seeking between 5% and 10% of employees to resign. And Trump administration officials say they’re planning sweeping layoffs for those who didn’t take the buyout as part of the effort to massively scale back the size of government.
The downsizing of the federal government will have impacts far beyond Washington, because the majority of federal workers live outside the nation’s capital, including tens of thousands of federal workers in red states run by Republicans.
Trump’s effort to purge what he views as personal or ideological opponents from the government has gone well beyond the actions of Musk.
Acting agency leaders across the government have quickly fired senior officials at several agencies as well as specific groups, including employees who worked in DEI offices and Justice Department officials involved in the prosecutions of the president.
Most of the approximately 2.4 million people who work for the federal government were offered a deferred resignation, though there were some initial exceptions, including postal workers, military personnel and those in positions related to immigration enforcement and national security.
Some national security officials were allowed to take the buyout: The CIA sent the offer to its entire workforce at the direction of CIA Director John Ratcliffe.
Federal agency supervisors were recently sent an email that would allow them to make the case for keeping certain federal workers off of firing lists, CNN has learned. The email reads like a survey, giving the supervisors specific criteria to consider when deciding whether to “retain or not retain” an employee.
“Criteria to consider includes employees ” who possess unique specialized skills or knowledge,” the email states. Other examples of exemptions from the firing list include cybersecurity staff, on-scene emergency and disaster assistance coordinators, and emergency management specialists.
Decisions on whether to take the resignation offer have been personal, an EPA union official told CNN. For instance, two EPA employees this official spoke to decided to retire rather than take the offer simply because they didn’t trust it and felt it went against their principles.
“They don’t think it’s a valid deal,” the union official said. “If I was buying a car or a house, and I substituted that for my career, which is the deal on the table — would I go into a contract with the terms that are in the Fork (email)? The answer is no, I wouldn’t come near it. Because I have no recourse, and it has a lot of outs for the other side but not for me.”
Many of the workers who chose not to take the deferred resignation offer face an uncertain future. The initial email from the Office of Personnel Management stated that it could not provide “full assurance regarding the certainty of your position or agency” to those who did not accept the package, which some workers considered coercive.
Among the next targets: “probationary” workers who have been employed a year or less, and therefore can be fired without triggering appeal rights, older federal workers who are being pushed to retire early, and federal employees working remotely.
Also, Trump wants to make it easier to fire career civil servants involved in policy, whom he thinks stood in the way of his implementing several of his priorities during his first term.
Among the flurry of executive orders he signed on his Inauguration Day was one creating a new category – called Schedule Policy/Career – for these workers that would strip them of their civil service protections. Critics argue the measure, which is similar to one he signed in late 2020 that established a so-called Schedule F, is intended to allow Trump to fill the ranks with loyal staffers. Several unions have already filed lawsuits over the effort, which also called for rolling back a 2024 Biden administration rule providing more protections for civil servants.
Another group of workers Trump has vowed to target are employees who work remotely. Trump issued a memorandum last month directing agencies to require all employees back to the office full time, even though federal employee unions have signed agreements with agencies to allow telework.
An OPM memo sent to agency heads on Monday and reviewed by CNN provides guidance to agencies on how they can override union collective bargaining agreements on telework and remote work, stating that agency heads have the ability to “set overall telework levels and to exclude specific positions from telework eligibility under the Telework Enhancement Act.”
“Provisions of collective bargaining agreements that conflict with management rights are unlawful and cannot be enforced,” the memo adds.
The American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal union, quickly lashed out at the Trump administration’s guidance to “ignore” collective bargaining agreements.
“Union contracts are enforceable by law, and the president does not have the authority to make unilateral changes to those agreements,” AFGE National President Everett Kelley said in a statement, noting that Trump’s initial return to the office directive and OPM guidance stated that collective bargaining obligations must be met.
The Trump administration’s first moves to upend the federal government were felt most acutely at USAID, after Trump placed a freeze on most frozen foreign aid.
Large swaths of the USAID workforce are being placed on leave Friday, upending the lives of hundreds of people who work abroad scrambling to figure out what comes next and how and when they will return to the US. Agency sources said the Trump administration is expected to keep fewer than 300 people at USAID, which has thousands of people around the world.
Nearly 60 USAID senior staff were put on leave a week into Trump’s presidency after being accused of trying to “circumvent the President’s Executive Orders.” Two senior security officials were placed on leave after DOGE officials were stopped trying to physically access USAID headquarters.
Then the agency was effectively taken over by the State Department on Monday, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced he was the acting head of USAID. Musk declared on X that he and his team “spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”
Trump cannot eliminate agencies on his own – such an action would require legislation from Congress. But Trump’s actions in the opening weeks of his prudency have the effect of smothering those parts of the federal government Trump does not like.
Rubio isn’t the only Cabinet secretary who’s inherited an agency in an acting capacity. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was named acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau after Trump fired its director, Rohit Chopra. Bessent ordered a review of the agency, established after the 2008 financial crash to protect consumers from financial abuses, to ensure “consistency” with the new administration.
The Education Department could be next, as Trump has said he wants to eliminate the federal agency and leave education to the states.
“I told Linda, ‘Linda, I hope you do a great job in putting yourself out of a job.’ I want her to put herself out of a job – Education Department,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday.
Other ripple effects are being felt at agencies across the government. CNN reported Thursday that employees in the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights were told they are being placed on paid administrative leave, with more than 160 employees impacted nationwide.
At the Justice Department, the personnel moves have been focused less on shrinking the size of the workforce than on Trump’s retribution.
Before Attorney General Pam Bondi was sworn in Wednesday, Trump appointees purged officials who were associated with the various investigations into Trump, ordered some senior FBI leaders to retire or resign, and demanded lists of thousands of FBI employees who were involved in the January 6 cases. More than 5,000 names were submitted, sources said.
But the Justice Department is also looking for broader cuts, announcing in an internal email on Wednesday that it would be participating in the Trump administration’s efforts to encourage some older federal workers to resign and get their retirement benefits early, according to a copy of the message obtained by CNN.
CNN reported this week that employees at all federal agencies were being offered this program, known as Voluntary Early Retirement Authority, or VERA, to incentivize longtime federal workers to depart. This is one part of Trump’s multi-pronged strategy to reduce the federal workforce by perhaps as much as 10%.
It’s unclear how many of the roughly 116,000 Justice Department employees will take these offers, which also came with a Thursday deadline.
One Justice Department official told CNN that the offers appear to be having a limited impact, mostly among people already close to retirement age, or staffers in the “probationary” period that are much easier to be fired outright and have already been targeted by the Trump administration.
Some who were thinking of leaving have decided to stay as a “show of solidarity,” the official said.
“The emails from the beginning have been insulting and demeaning… it’s stupid to think that people who aren’t in it for the money could be bought out with money,” the official told CNN.
The judge’s decision to halt Musk’s deferred resignation program for several days is the latest instance where a judge has pressed pause on Trump’s early executive actions.
Last week, two judges blocked an attempt to freeze spending on federal grants and loans. The Office of Management and Budget had sent a memo to agencies with the sweeping pause on spending, which sparked widespread confusion and was rescinded along with the court-imposed pauses.
The effort appeared to be an initial attempt for the Trump administration to get around the Impoundment Control Act, which bars the Executive Branch from refusing to spend congressionally appropriated funds.
And a federal judge has limited the access of DOGE employees to a highly sensitive payment system at the Treasury Department. Emails show that Musk’s lieutenants sought access to the system after asking the Treasury Department to immediately shut off all USAID payments.
Ultimately, many of these cases could end up before the Supreme Court, which could decide how much Trump and Musk can overhaul the government as it’s currently constituted.
Stephen Vladeck, a CNN legal analyst and a professor at Georgetown Law School, said that the Supreme Court, though it sided with Trump in last year’s immunity case, could ultimately block some of the most dramatic changes Trump is seeking.
“I think Trump is going to lose more of these cases than he’s going to win. Even this Supreme Court is going to take serious issue with just how radically and how quickly the administration is trying to rewrite decades, if not centuries, of settled law in this space,” Vladeck said. “And the lower courts, which will be even more focused on how much harm these actions are causing on the ground, will be that much more inclined to block them while the litigation unfolds.”
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