"A senior administration official told NBC News that they expect 5%-10% of the federal workforce to quit, which, they estimate, could lead to around $100 billion in savings."
If they quit now, and are paid for another 8 months, how does that save any money?
Similarly, if they quit and need to be replaced, you're going to spend more money hiring and training the replacement, so for 8 months you're paying double salary, one for the person who quit and one for their replacement...
Oh they'll be replaced, with "private" workers supplied by Musk, etc.
The private "workers" will be AI or cheaply paid foreign workers.
They will be incapable of doing the job, not because they are incompetent, but because they were the lowest bid and lied.
After 2+ years of doing nothing they'll need to be replaced by more workers. The government can't function without them, so we'll hire twice as many, still paying less than the average American and pocketing the remainder.
After 4+ years, assuming the administration leaves, they'll all be fired by the new administration and Americans will be brought in. They'll have to do 4+ years worth of backlog plus the current job. After these 4 years they be deemed as incompetent and we'll start the whole cycle over again.
Apart from all the people who will suffer and possibly die from the lack of social services.
People will suffer and die due to Trump's destruction of the country's infrastructure.
If all federal workers hypothetically quit, everybody in the US would sudenly realize very directly and immediately the disaster Trump has created and might decide to topple him and his henchmen.
But realistically they won't. So federal services wil slowly worsen and people will suffer more and more without doing anything about it, like the proverbial slowly-boiled frog.
That's how all dictatorships entrench themselves: things get slowly worse, but slowly enough that people don't want to take up arms, until it's too late to take up arms.
Stealing what someone else said in the other thread: It is 7 months pay OR $25k whichever is LOWER. Watch as Trump misrepresents it as whichever is HIGHER.
Unless someone is literally about to start a new job in two weeks anyway, why the hell would they take such a pitiful buyout? $25k is jack shit these days especially when the cost is your entire livelyhood.
Might have to look at that though, it's possible once the funds have been allocated to a department Congress extra less control over how there are used. As long as there's some loophole where the money can be spent on severance, and it doesn't cost more money than was allocated for the year(how can it? It's just paying people for not working)
It's not a buyout. They can continue to WFH until September if they swear to resign. That's not a buyout, that's just continuing to work until you resign in the future. It also doesn't guarantee them their jobs, just that they won't be fired for not returning to the office (which is something the administration will probably going to have a hard time doing).
With the bills proposed by the house right now federal workers won't have great benefits for long. Benefits are better on the county level in many cases already.