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The White House has offered buyouts to nearly all federal employees who do not wish to return to work in the office, giving them until February 6 to accept.
Its human resources arm sent a letter to hundreds of thousands of government workers on Tuesday evening offering eight months of salary to any who resigned by next Thursday. It included a “deferred resignation letter” for anyone who wanted to participate.
Federal employees may choose to return to work in the office full time, but those workers could be cut later, according to a copy of the White House’s memo seen by the Financial Times.
“At this time we cannot give you full assurance regarding the certainty of your position or agency but should your position be eliminated you will be treated with dignity and will be afforded protections in place for such position,” the memo read.
The memo to employees follows a series of executive orders Trump signed last week requiring employees return to the office full time, altering hiring processes and updating the system to assess senior government workers.
The move, less than two weeks after Trump returned to the presidency, comes while he rushes to slash federal spending as he implements an agenda to deregulate the US economy and downsize the government.
Trump tasked billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead a new Department of Government Efficiency tasked with finding federal programmes to slash. Ramaswamy has already departed from Doge.
On Tuesday, the White House issued a memo freezing federal payments to programmes, including those helping the country’s poor, but a federal judge blocked the plan just minutes before it was to take effect.
Last week, Trump’s administration halted foreign aid programmes and moved to scrap loans and grants for clean energy projects.
On Tuesday, secretary of state Marco Rubio approved an additional waiver for life-saving humanitarian assistance, which he defined as “core life-saving medicine, medical services, food, shelter and subsistence assistance”.
The Republican president expects that “the majority of federal agencies are likely to be downsized”, though some agencies and military branches could see increases in the size of their work force, the memo said.
The offer could affect large swaths of the federal workforce. A December report from the Office of Personnel Management found that 43 per cent of civilian federal workers engaged in telework on “a routine or situational” basis.
A senior administration official said they anticipated 5 per cent to 10 per cent of the federal workforce would take the buyout offer. The programme could save as much as $100bn per year, the official said.
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