Federal workers took the ‘buyout.’ Some got fired anyway

When Laura, a federal employee for the Department of Agriculture in the Midwest, got an email offering her a chance to resign with pay through September or otherwise face the prospect of termination, she took it.

Laura had been in rural development, helping people access home ownership, for about six months. She knew mass terminations were likely to effect her because she was a probationary worker, a government status for employees with less than a year in their role.

“I saw the writing on the wall,” said Laura, who declined to use her last name out of fear of retaliation.

But one week after she received confirmation of her acceptance into the “deferred resignation program,” she woke up to an email informing her she’d been terminated anyway.

“No phone call, no nothing,” she said. Then, like many federal employees, Laura immediately lost access to her work communications.

Laura is part of a group of federal employees across multiple agencies who were suddenly fired last week due to their probationary status, despite having accepted the offer from a government-wide email titled “Fork in the Road.”

The former federal workers have since faced days of conflicting information from the federal government about their futures, with many, like Laura, in the dark without access to their work email.

Roughly 200,000 government employees were categorized as probationary, the group targeted by the Trump administration’s first wave of mass firings last week. Neither the White House nor the federal agencies have publicly disclosed how many were laid off, and within that group, it’s not clear how many people were mistakenly terminated despite accepting the Fork in the Road offer, which about 75,000 workers did, according to the White House.

Some federal workers have since been contacted by their agencies on their personal email and cell phone, informing them that they still qualify and need to opt-in again by Friday. But they worry that others who were terminated will slip through the cracks, unaware that they can still qualify for the deferred resignation program.

“It’s all very disorganized,” Laura said. “My best piece of advice is definitely reach out to your leadership.”

For Laura, it was only through her own patchwork research that she found out that she might still be eligible for the offer and then called her supervisor, who confirmed.

She’d found a colleague on LinkedIn, Nick Detter, who worked as a natural resource specialist for the Department of Agriculture in Kansas. Detter, also a probationary employee, had taken the deferred resignation program for the same reason as Laura — and, like her, still received a termination notice.

But Detter had refused to turn in his work laptop, hanging on to his email communications until there was more clarity on the deferred resignation program.

Detter told Laura he’d received an email on Tuesday afternoon, days after she’d been terminated and had to turn in her access to work communications, which said that the department “intend[ed] to honor the terms of the [deferred resignation program].”

Detter, who’d spoken to multiple news outlets about his situation, continued to get a flood of messages from colleagues who were in the same position.

One colleague said his supervisor had explicitly told him that probationary employees were never supposed to qualify for the deferred resignation program, so to take the termination letter as final.

But then Detter and his colleagues received another email, nearly a week after their initial terminations, apologizing for the “lack of, or conflicting information” and the “confusion” that being fired may have caused.

“This notice serves to clarify that as an employee on probationary or trial period status who may have opted into the Deferred Resignation Program (DRP), you are NOW eligible to participate in DRP,” the email said.

“We apologize for the lack of, or conflicting information, surrounding the DRP and any confusion your termination notice may have caused.”

The email instructed recipients to reply by Feb. 21 with “your continued intention to participate,” and said employees would be reinstated by Feb. 24.

Still, many questions remain for the federal workers, like whether they’ll receive a paycheck for the days they were unsure of their work status, or whether they can have confidence that they’ll receive one going forward.

Already, they had watched as the Office of Personnel Management, the human resources arm of the government, sent FAQs reassuring federal workers that the program was legitimate, encouraging them to take it. Billionaire Elon Musk, who had sent a near-identical email to employees at Twitter after he took it over, also enthusiastically supported the offer. But unions pushed back, warning employees that there was no precedent for such a move and that people who accepted it could be left high and dry. A legal challenge delayed the program timeline, pausing it and pushing the deadline to accept the offer to Feb. 12, but ultimately allowing it to proceed. And then, mass terminations across dozens of agencies began.

“I don’t know that I have a ton of confidence in the offer after this experience,” Laura said. At this point, she said, she’s holding on to the benefit of being able to at least say she resigned, rather than was terminated, when she files for unemployment or applies for other jobs.

Detter said he initially had high hopes for the restructuring outlined in the Fork in the Road email, encouraged by pledges to increase efficiency and have more merit-based systems for promotions and pay.

“But in my experience over the last month with this whole thing, that’s not what this has been. This has just been slash and burn,” he said.

Even after receiving the email apologizing for the mistake, a lawyer for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said he still felt that he was in the same situation as when he’d first been fired a week ago.

The former CFPB employee said he took the deferred resignation offer because he was working remotely, which the Fork in the Road email warned would no longer be tolerated. As the primary income earner for his wife and young children, he wanted to “play it conservatively,” he said.

“But the sand keeps shifting every day,” he said.

Though his supervisors have told him that he will now get the deferred resignation offer despite his termination last Tuesday and he has signed a contract, he said there is reason to be skeptical.

He hasn’t gotten confirmation that he’s been reinstated as an employee, he hasn’t gotten a paycheck, and he worries about the future of his agency, which has been all but shuttered by the Trump administration in the last few weeks.

“If our agency is fully dismantled and the assets end up being moved away, I don’t know what my agency is paying me with,” he said.

“I’m effectively in the same position I was a week ago when I was just terminated, feeling like I need to support a family of four. I still need to find a job, I still need to find a sure thing,” he said.