Buyout Offer Extended to the CIA

Just over a week ago, the Trump administration sent a buyout offer to about 2 million federal employees. But there were certain groups of employees that were no given that offer at the time, including postal workers and anyone in the intelligence community.

Yesterday, the same buyout offer was extended to the entire CIA at the request of the new CIA director, John Ratcliffe.

The CIA appeared to be the first intelligence agency to tell its employees that they can quit their jobs and receive about eight months of pay and benefits as part of Trump’s push to downsize the federal government…

Ratcliffe told the White House to extend the same buyout package to the CIA, the aide said, believing it would pave the way for a more aggressive spy agency. 

A CIA spokeswoman said the move was part of an effort to “infuse the agency with renewed energy.”

There are three reasons for this (at least). First, Trump is offering anyone who objects to his presidency a chance to leave and find work elsewhere. He doesn’t want resistance 2.0 to form inside these agencies so he’s literally offering to pay people to leave in hopes of getting rid of some of that internal negativity.

Secondly, the Trump administration believes the CIA in particular has become bloated with too many analysts.

Some national security officials in Trump’s orbit believe that the CIA in recent years has become too heavily weighted towards analysis at the expense of clandestinely collecting intelligence and carrying out covert operations – functions of the agency’s much smaller Directorate of Operations.

Third, the overarching DOGE effort means there is a push to reduce the number of government workers overall to reduce spending. The federal government has about 2.3 million full-time employees, the bulk of which work for the Department of Defense. That amount to around $270 billion a year in salaries and benefits. The government spends more than that, about half a trillion per year, on pensions and veterans benefits.

But so far it looks like not many employees are taking him up on it, in part because union organizers and elected officials are telling them the offer can’t be trusted.

 “There’s no statutory authority that I can see for the president making this offer,” said Sen. Tim Kaine (D., Va.), who represents tens of thousands of federal workers and said no constituents have told him they are taking the deal. Doing so presents risk, he said: “The administration immediately knows, you don’t want to work for me. They’ll find some other way to get rid of you. You should not raise your hand.”

I spoke to someone last week who works for a government agency (not the CIA) who said most employees are angry about the tone of the email and don’t believe they would ever actually get the 8-months severance so they are refusing to accept it. That tracks with what Axios reported yesterday.

About 20,000 federal workers have accepted the “buyout” offer put forward by the Trump administration last week, a senior administration official tells Axios.

It’s a significant number of people — about 1% of the federal workforce — but still substantially less than the White House’s target of 5% to 10%.

But OPM has tried to push back on that by saying resigning employees will sign a document which legally binds the government to pay their severance.

OPM on Tuesday issued new guidance seeking to defend the offer’s legality, insisting that the agreement resigning federal workers will sign legally binds agencies into maintaining their pay and benefits until September.

“The deferred resignation program offers employees who opt into the program an exemption from any return-to-work requirements and full pay and benefits regardless of workload, with the expectation that most employees will transition their duties and be placed on administrative leave for the bulk of the deferred resignation period,” wrote acting OPM Director Charles Ezell. “Those assurances are binding on the government. Were the government to backtrack on its commitments, an employee would be entitled to request a rescission of his or her resignation.”

My own take is that this isn’t going to work. If left-wing bureaucrats are anything, they are reliably paranoid about Trump (and Musk). Anything Trump wants them to do, they won’t do. So they are going to hang on for now and some of them will ultimately lose their jobs anyway as the government downsizes. We’ll have to wait and see if the CIA and the DOD is cut the same as other agencies.