While many U.S. workers cling to their paychecks as the job market is rocked by AI-related headcount cuts and dwindling opportunities, federal employees in the thousands are willfully walking out the door.
Today, America will experience its largest mass resignation in history, as 100,000 federal workers are set to formally quit their jobs. It’s a result of the Trump administration’s “fork in the road” Deferred Resignation Program (DRP) that staffers have taken up over previous months, who were allowed to transfer their workload and go on administrative leave until the official end date of federal service on September 30 2025.
The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) tells Fortune that about 154,000 federal workers in total took the deal, with the majority leaving today and others exiting by the end of year.
It claims that the large-scale cut will save about $28 billion annually by lowering long-term spending. OPM spokesperson McLaurine Pinover tells Fortune that the administration delivered on its end of the employment bargain, and that no previous administration has been “even close to saving American taxpayers this amount of money in such a short amount of time.” A Senate analysis from July reports that the DRP program was set to cost $14.8 billion to pay the wages and benefits of around 200,000 federal workers taking up to eight months of leave.
“Ultimately, the deferred resignation program was not only legal, it provided over 150,000 civil servants a dignified and generous departure from the federal government. It also delivered incredible relief to the American taxpayer,” Pinover says.
The resignations are taking effect as Congress faces a deadline today to authorize more funding, or risk a U.S. government shutdown. If no deal is reached, then the White House has instructed federal agencies—already rocked by Elon Musk’s DOGE layoffs since January—to make way for even larger cuts.
This year’s decline of 300,000 federal workers—a stark contrast to white-collar employees ‘job-hugging’
The U.S. federal workforce has been shrinking since President Trump retook office this January. His administration has been adamant on reducing inefficiencies, setting up the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) helmed by Tesla CEO Musk, which originally promised to oversee an elimination of $2 trillion in government waste, fraud, and abuse. Musk later reassessed his estimate down to $150 billion.
In February, two million U.S. government employees received an email from OPM detailing options for them to resign. The message was titled “a fork in the road”—a term tied to the DRP plan; The same subject line Musk sent out to workers when he took over the social media platform Twitter, now called “X.” The message to federal staffers offered employees the option to step down and receive payment through the end of September, when the resignation goes into effect. In the meantime, virtually all USAID employees were laid off, after thousands had already been let go due to the administration’s foreign aid freeze.
But USAID wasn’t the only government agency that was hit by layoffs. Workers in DEI-related roles were also put on paid leave to eventually be let go, and Musk also targeted the Treasury Department. The Partnership of Public Service estimated that DOGE could cost taxpayers roughly $135 billion to fire, re-hire, and put employees on leave. In just the first five months of this year, the federal government was slimmed down by about 59,000 employees, and there’s a collective estimate that there will be about 300,000 fewer government workers by the end of this year. It’s the biggest federal workforce reduction in a single year since WWII. This includes a combination of laid-off employees, probationary staffers, alongside those who took the resignation deal.
The mass resignation is in stark contrast to white-collar employees “job-hugging,” but their willingness to leave may be in part to the corroding work atmosphere at federal agencies. Since DOGE’s swift job cuts, government staffers have described an environment of “fear” and “madness,” with one employee at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) telling The Guardian that the buyout emails were “clearly designed to disturb and scare people, among all of the things they actually say, which are clear threats.” For some, choosing to resign was an option to not prolong the anxiety of a probable firing, while being able to take advantage of the deal and look for private-sector work.
“I am concerned we will all be mass fired,” a U.S. Department of Transportation staffer, who was put on a probationary term appointment, told The Guardian in February. “Teams would be hobbled and gutted. It would be like closing your eyes and randomly throwing acid on a flower garden. You would just have dead spots, and no planning for which ones.”
Are you a U.S. federal worker who took the resignation deal? We’d like to hear why! Reach out at emma.burleigh@fortune.com