We can learn a great deal about the modern United States from the opening battles of President Trump’s second term. One of the most interesting is the buyout offer for federal employees.
In an effort to cut the incredibly bloated federal bureaucracy, the Trump administration has offered an opportunity to resign now while being paid through October and obtaining a bonus for doing so.
Like similar programs in the private sector, the program is designed to take into account employees who might be nearing retirement age, employees on medical leave, and so forth, even clarifying that taking the buyout would not preclude a person from applying for a different federal role in the future.
It’s optional – if an employee would rather roll the dice and hope to survive the coming layoffs, he’s welcome to do so. But there will be layoffs, because there have to be; this massive leviathan is simply unsustainable.
So, just like it is for a private sector employee who is offered such a deal by an employer on the ropes, taking the deal is usually a wiser choice than turning it down.
The days of an ever-expanding federal government are over.
In the private sector, an employee would look at it this way. For round numbers, let’s say you earn $100,000/year salary. You’ve been offered eight months of pay – that’s $66,666 – plus a bonus for taking the deal – another $25,000 or so. If you get another job right away, or even just within a month or two, you just got yourself a half year’s salary as a signing bonus. That’s a hard deal to beat; it could push up your eventual retirement by a year or two, depending on your age.
As of the deadline day, at least 60,000 government employees had accepted the offer. Not bad. And then a federal judge (exceeding his authority) mandated an extension – which will likely cause even more people to accept it.
Obviously, all these employees are at different levels, in different jobs, different agencies, different states, so there’s a broad range here. But if we can safely assume an average total cost per employee of at least $100,000/year (including benefits, office space, overhead/burden and so forth over the salary, so this is likely a very conservative figure), those 60,000 people are saving the government $6 billion per year by leaving. And, depending on how low that estimate is, we know it’s really a lot more.
But we have a question: why hasn’t a larger part of the federal workforce taken advantage of the offer? The offer didn’t cover everyone; air traffic controllers and members of the military, for example, weren’t given the option. But since most of the federal government’s millions were invited, it’s surprising that only a couple percent have taken it.
This may tell us something that we’ve always suspected about the federal government.
In the private sector, we know that almost all jobs are classified as “employment at will,” meaning that unless you have a formal employment contract, you can be fired or laid off at any time. When companies give generous buyout offers, therefore, we in the private sector usually happily grab at them, because we know that if you take the buyout, and get another job right away, it is an unparalleled windfall.
But here’s the thing: as tempting as that offer is to a private sector employee, it may not be all that tempting to a government employee.
Why? Because, since the public sector doesn’t function like the private sector, government employees don’t think like private sector employees either.
For far too many years, government jobs have been thought of as guaranteed jobs for life. Maybe they didn’t pay as well as private sector jobs, but they were more secure, so that made up for it. But then they gradually started to pay better and better, until they reached the point at which a lot of government jobs do in fact pay better than similar roles in the private sector, while still enjoying the job security that used to justify a lower wage.
Over the years, this process turned government jobs into something almost irresistible, a product so addictive that once you have one, you can’t bear to let it go.
When the new Trump administration offered this generous buyout offer, they figured a lot of people would jump at it, knowing that huge reductions in the federal workforce are coming soon. Better a buyout offer than a pink slip with nothing attached.
But many government employees have not been conditioned to think that way, and they just don’t believe that this administration will really do the serious cutbacks that we know it must. So a good number have accepted the offer, but nowhere near the five or ten percent we were hoping for.
But the government worker mentality isn’t the only reason. Something else is going on:
As we saw the prior week from the brief tariff kerfuffle with Canada and Mexico, the American Left – along with their foolish shills in the media – are trying to spread the narrative that President Trump’s policies are going to cause a recession.
To say this is a foolish fear is putting it mildly. But it’s still out there. The Left is telling people that a departure from Keynesian lunacy and a switch to supply side – or maybe even Austrian! – economics would be fatal to the stock market and to corporate America. So, anyone who believes that argument, especially people so isolated that they only hear that argument, might therefore be inclined to resist the very sensible draw of this buyout offer.
Honestly, any sane onlooker can tell that the economy is on the upswing. Even if private sector hiring isn’t going gangbusters just yet (it’s only been three weeks), we know it’s around the corner. And we also know that government firings are also ongoing.
If ever there were a time to get out of government, and enter the private sector, it’s today.
But as the Left preaches its gloom and doom pronouncements, making the most of the corrupt media empires that they control – and as the left insists that the country will spin into recession or depression – many foolish government workers do indeed believe that left-wing line instead of applying common sense and seeing that the grass truly is greener on the private sector side.
So it is indeed likely that this acceptance of Democrat talking points is the main barrier to more government employees taking advantage of this generous offer.
Of course, there could be a couple of more sides to it: some government employees probably think that a more generous buyout will follow, though such optimism may be misguided. There just isn’t time for the administration to play cat and mouse that way.
Also, the private sector team running this initiative may not have fully realized just how overwhelmingly favorable these government employee packages are. Many of these government employees have such a sweet deal, in many ways so much better than private sector employees ever have, that it’s very, very difficult to convince them to give it up.
Sort of a “the bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” kind of situation.
The more who take the deal, the better of we all art. And the more who don’t take it, the more involuntary layoffs there will have to be.
Prayers up for President Trump and his team; they are doing the right things, trying their level best to set this ship back on the right course, after a century of error.
May Divine Providence guide their hands.
Copyright 2025 John F Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance professional and consultant. President of the Ethnic American Council in the 1980s and Chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party in the 1990s, his book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel) and his political satires on the current administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), are available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.
His newest nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” was just released on July 1, and is also available, in both paperback and Kindle eBook, exclusively on Amazon.
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