America's Talking - White House to Trim Federal Workforce Through Buyouts

Episode Date: February 1, 2025

The White House took steps to make good on its promise to cut the federal government down to size by giving federal workers a choice: return to the office full-time or leave with eight months of pay. The Office of Personnel Management told federal workers Tuesday night that they have until Feb. 6 to decide to stay or go. If they step down, they will continue getting all pay and benefits and be exempt from in-person work requirements until Sept. 30. However, the Trump administration said that even government employees who stay on could still eventually lose their jobs as the president reshapes the federal government and its workforce.Support this podcast: https://secure.anedot.com/franklin-news-foundation/ce052532-b1e4-41c4-945c-d7ce2f52c38a?source_code=xxxxxxFull story: https://www.thecentersquare.com/national/article_750b1a5c-de57-11ef-8ce1-0fe0a983828f.html Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Greetings, everyone, and welcome to America in Focus, powered by the Center Square. I'm Dan McAulb, Chief Content Officer at Franklin News Foundation, publisher of the Center Square Newswire Service. As part of his whirlwind first two weeks of his second term, President Donald Trump has issued a slew of executive orders and taken other action on a variety of policy issues. Among them is his vow to cut government spending. The national debt is $36.4 trillion and rising rapidly. interest on that debt now cost taxpayers more than annual spending on the U.S. Department of Defense.

President Trump's promise to cut spending, including his letting go federal workers. Joining me to discuss this is Casey Harper, Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief for the Center Square. Casey, let's start with Trump's plans to cut the federal workforce. What did you do this week? Yeah, I mean, the American people voted for a bull in a China shop, Dan, and the China's being broken. Every day, every day there's some new executive order. cutting spending, we're sending programs. It's definitely been messy. And, you know, the federal employees buyout, which he referred to, has certainly been a part of that. And so, you know, part of what Trump and his effort

with Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency, has been to do is to cut hundreds of billions of dollars in federal spending. Elon Musk, who heads up, Doge, said during the campaign, it could get up to $2 trillion. Trump himself has only said hundreds of billions, which would still be, you know, pretty significant cuts. And they've been very aggressive and ambitious in that so far. When it comes to federal employees, they essentially offered them a buyout. I mean, this is not that uncommon. This is not that crazy. You see this at private companies.

We've seen it. I believe Bill Clinton offered some federal employees a buyout as well. But Trump's buyout is pretty generous. It's eight months of severance pay if you voluntarily quit in the next, a little over the next week. And so the idea with this is that if they can get all these federal employees, to just resign, they won't have to fire them. It's very difficult to fire people in the federal government. And it'll just immediately cut the workforce. Now, you might say, well, they're paying

eight months severance. Won't that cost a lot of money? But long term, it'll save a lot of money, actually, because even if you fired those people, you're still going to have to pay them a lot, probably. And this guarantees that, you know, in eight months from now, there's going to be a stark drop in the federal workforce cost. Now, a lot of employees, you know, there was a certain of federal employees and it showed they basically don't trust this plan. Many of them don't. They're afraid that the severance will later be taken away from them, that it's a trick somehow that, you know, once they resign, that somehow they won't end up getting the money. But the thing is, if they don't take this, then Trump may end up firing them anyway and they won't get that severance. So he's

trying to incentivize it. And the White House has reportedly said they expect five to 10% of federal employees to take the buyout. And part of that executive order includes returning to work, meaning returning to the office. Under Biden, many federal employees have been allowed to work from home, in part because of the start of the pandemic, but we're well beyond the pandemic. Trump has vowed to get federal workers return to the office. So if you want to keep your job, he said you have to return to the office. If you don't want to return to the office, you can take this buyout, right?

Yeah, that's right. He knows, I think there's also just generally a lot of fear among federal employees because of all the changes, you know, or federal, you know, I mean, who knows you could reject the buyout and then Trump issues an executive order the next day that somehow cancels your agency or combines your agency with another agency and says that all the staff are now, you know, duplicative. And so there needs to be major cuts, right? It's so unpredictable that yes, of course, coming back to work as part of the calculus. But if you're a federal employee right now, I mean, you really. don't know if your agency is going to even exist the way it does even from day to day. Another executive orders related to spending that Trump signed this week early in the week, Monday I think it was, was a freeze on certain spending, including grants. And so the Trump administration could evaluate whether or not they thought it was legitimate spending or wasteful spending. That caused a lot of confusion across the country, particularly in blue states and blue cities.

They pushed hard back. Trump then rescinded that order. on Wednesday. Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, I mean, one thing that's been really interesting that Trump has done is he kind of stops the spending and then figures out what spending should continue instead of gradually phasing out the spending or, you know, piece by piece. And I think the reason he's doing that is because in the past lawmakers and, you know, politicians have promised these big cuts, but they stretch it out. They say we're going to cut, you know, two trillion dollars over the next 10 years. And it never really amounts to anything because they put all the

benefits in the front load, all the benefits, and they put all the cuts at the end of the 10 years. And then two years from now, the lawmakers come in and they change it and they push it 10 more years down the road. And so these slow cuts to the federal government have really been deceptive and not really amounted to much. And so I think I understand the argument for being aggressive here. But that being said, it caused a lot of confusion, a lot of fear. There's a lot of good programs that suddenly, you know, had their funding ripped out from under them. And they're like, wait, wait. And so it caused a lot of pushback for Trump. And so he said, you know what, let's just, we'll keep the grant going.

But that doesn't mean we're not going to cut this funding later. We'll just, we'll let you have it for now to avoid the confusion. But they're still going, you know, line by line through all this funding and eliminating things. You know, I wrote this week at the Center Square.com at the first White House press briefing, Carolyn Levitt, she's talking about, you know, how they stopped money from going to the World Health Organization, which Trump just signed an order basically to leave or, you know, you know, sending money for birth control to Gaza, millions and millions of dollars for condoms in Gaza. I mean, so they're highlighting these examples to show how to control the program.

Programs have become. And so, I don't know, I think more examples like that will help them with their argument. Well, Casey, as I said up front, this has been a whirlwind first two weeks of the Trump administration. I think the intention is good. There has been confusion over some things. there have been concern, as you mentioned, among federal workers. But he was elected by the majority of the people in this country to change the federal government, the way the federal government operates.

He thinks he's got, he feels like he's got a mandate and he's doing it. Final word. Final thought. I'm glad you gave me the final word. I'm here in the D.C. area and I have hearing a lot of people complain who work in the government, who work in federal contracting, and they're complaining about how disruptive it is. And I just told him, I said, I mean, I understand, but this is what the American people wanted. They wanted a disruptor.

And I think they knew that it would be messy and that it would not be perfect and that it might, you know, do some unwanted damage. But they're so frustrated with the gridlock and the corruption in D.C. That they wanted someone to go in there and just tear it up. Even if he made a mess and some blunders along the way, they wanted someone to be a bull in the China shop. and that's what they got this week. Thank you for joining us today, Casey. Listeners can keep up with this story and more at thecentersquare.com.