How Elon Musk forked up his mass resignation plan

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“New Fork email just dropped” is a message I’ve received way too many times in the past week. The irony is that this objectively ridiculous sentence impacts the livelihoods of thousands of federal workers and the people who depend on them.

On Tuesday, January 28th, federal employees across all agencies received an email from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) with the subject line “Fork in the Road.” People who read too much news about Elon Musk will recognize it as the same subject line to an email he sent at Twitter when he first took over in 2022. The objective, then and now, was the same: Get people to voluntarily resign in service of shrinking the workforce.

But unlike at Twitter, where Musk reportedly culled 80% of the staff six months into his reign, federal workers were not so easily bamboozled. 

The original Fork email informed workers that the federal workforce would be significantly reformed in order to comply with Trump’s executive orders, and that the future of the workforce would be built around “four pillars”: return to office; performance culture; more streamlined and flexible workforce: and enhanced standards of conduct. If you weren’t down with these pillars, OPM said, you had an out.

“If you choose not to continue in your current role in the federal workforce,” the email stated, “we thank you for your service to your country and you will be provided with a dignified, fair departure from the federal government utilizing a deferred resignation program.” Workers were told their job security couldn’t be guaranteed if they didn’t resign, and that they had until February 6th to respond. Those who elected to join the program would cease work immediately but get paid through September 30th.

Seems like a decent deal until you look even one millimeter closer and realize it’s built on a foundation of quicksand. 

Naturally workers had many questions, which prompted OPM to create an FAQ page two days later. The answers, some of which were shared in a government-wide email to staffers, dripped with disdain. Some examples:

Beyond these callous responses, the FAQ also made it clear that there was no legal basis for any of what OPM claimed to be offering, and no legal protections offered to the people being asked to take it. Furthermore, they were being told to join a program for which a formal agreement hadn’t even been shared and the promised severance was not guaranteed.

Musk and company were banking on the people they’d derided as “lower quality” workers also having lower quality deductive reasoning skills. After all, do people who don’t work in Silicon Valley even have brains?

“I feel like a lot of us were so insulted by the Fork in the Road, that we're going to stick around out of spite,” one federal employee told me after the FAQs went out. 

“It is evident those writing these messages have no concept of what the 2.3 million of us do every day,” another told me.

And that continued to be clear over the ensuing days. By Sunday another email had been sent out, this one highlighting more of the FAQs. By Monday, federal workers finally received an “example” agreement to which they’d be agreeing should they choose to resign. It was remarkably dubious, even by this administration’s standards. And on Tuesday, OPM sent out another memo titled “Legality of Deferred Resignation Agreement” that amounted to, “Just trust me, bro. It’s legal.” Spoiler: the workers did not trust. And shortly thereafter they received an updated version of the example agreement. 

The desperation was showing.

On Wednesday I learned that a collective of labor unions representing more the 800,000 federal workers represented by nonprofit Democracy Forward had asked a federal court to extend the deadline for the “Fork” deal, calling it an, “arbitrary, unlawful, short-fused ultimatum buy-out program.” 

Thursday—the last day to accept the deal—began with yet another email letting federal workers know it was now or never, and that the deadline would not be delayed. However, at the 1pm hearing for the Democracy Forward case, we received what was maybe the first bit of good news since the federal funding freeze was halted: The judge blocked the deferred resignation program, thereby extending the deadline. Parties must return to court on Monday and present their arguments. 

Shortly thereafter, staffers at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) shared with me that they’d received calls from their supervisors stressing the expected timeline for returning to work in person, and seemingly pressuring them to take the deal. And oh yea, they could only share this via phone because they couldn’t leave a paper trail. Definitely how you handle matters of the utmost legality.

Also on Thursday, IRS employees received an email telling them they’re exempt from the deferred resignation program until May 15th—presumably because the administration remembered it’s tax season. Some federal employees received a message Thursday afternoon with the “final” template of the agreement attached to an email that [unironically] stated: “The government honors its promises, and it will honor this promise.”

“No legal citations, no reference to binding precedent stating that the law prevails over incorrectly issued agency guidance,” one federal employee who shared a copy of the most recent email messaged me. “Just vibes lmao.”

And by late Thursday, OPM blasted out a message letting workers know the deadline had been extended but still encouraging them to join. No mention of the possibility that its legality was being challenged. But still, workers would live to fight at least another weekend.

You might be asking yourself, “why would the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) want people to be paid to stay home until September? How is that efficient?” The important thing to remember is that this isn’t about economic efficiency, despite what the billionaire at the helm may say. It’s about efficiently breaking morale within the federal government to make it easier to dismantle from the inside. Musk and his band of evil babies have tried their best to move fast and break things, to use tech industry parlance, but the possibility still remains that they’ll be unable to outrun the law. At least not entirely. 

Now Musk and Trump face a fork in the road themselves: They can hope the courts will lift the temporary restraining order and allow them to move forward with the resignation program, or they could re-strategize.

But even if the deferred resignation program isn’t successful, Musk has already put the wheels in motion for other ways to cull the federal workforce. On Thursday OPM sent out a new memo asking for employee performance data under the guise of helping meet compliance with the executive orders. In an appendix to the memo, it asks for a list of employees with the lowest performance reviews in the last years. It’s not a stretch to imagine they’re next on the chopping block. 

There’s also been talk of probationary employees—folks with less than two years below their belt—being next to go if the resignation numbers don’t meet Musk’s expectations. And they have reason to worry: a federal employee in a department of only a few hundred people heard that only five had agreed to the Fork agreement, most of whom had been planning to retire already.

It’s undeniable, however, that the wind has been taken out of Musk’s sails yet again, even as his unofficial government agency continues to infiltrate the darkest corners of our government. And above all, thanks to Thursday’s court order, the Fork program has been framed as illegal to all federal workers. Because it is.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to strike the right balance between posting on Bluesky and sending out newsletters here. Bluesky seems to be the ideal place for breaking smaller scoops and tidbits of information, while the newsletter feels like a space to process the bigger picture. That said, if I have another OMB-level scoop, you’ll find out right here right away. So I do encourage you to follow me on Bluesky if you’re looking for up-to-the-minute coup coverage, and keep looking out for The Handbasket in your inbox. 

Just for fun, here’s some nice press:

The Associated Press — The power of independent journalism: From her Brooklyn apartment, she ‘scooped’ the nation’s media

Columbia Journalism Review — Q&A: Marisa Kabas on Scooping the World on the Federal Funding Freeze

Nieman Lab — An independent journalist doubled paid subscriptions after scooping everyone on the federal funding freeze

Business Insider — How a journalist used her newsletter to break the story about a White House plan to freeze federal grants — and how she's building a business