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Billionaire Elon Musk’s influence over a traditionally nonpartisan agency that oversees the federal workforce culminated in the government’s stunning proposal Tuesday offering employees an inducement to resign, according to four people familiar with the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal talks.
The proposal, emailed late in the day to many of the nation’s 2.3 million federal workers, blindsided some advisers to President Donald Trump, including officials in the budget office and agencies that typically would be consulted in advance of such monumental changes to personnel and spending policies, the people said.
Since Trump took office, Musk has moved quickly to exert control over the Office of Personnel Management, the small independent agency that acts as a kind of human resources department for the federal government, issuing policy for agencies to implement. Musk personally visited the OPM’s offices Friday, and several of his longtime surrogates - including Anthony Armstrong, who helped Musk buy Twitter; Brian Bjelde, who ran human resources for Musk’s firm SpaceX; and Amanda Scales, who worked at Musk’s artificial intelligence firm, xAI - have been installed in senior leadership roles at its offices in downtown Washington, the people said.
Musk’s team also was critical to building the system that sent an email from “hr@opm.gov” to most federal employees across a dizzying array of agencies - a capacity that had not existed before last week. Musk touted the offer on X soon after it hit employees’ inboxes, arguing it was a crucial first step in reorganizing a federal bureaucracy he has long characterized as lazy and disloyal. The email emphasized the importance of a “reliable, loyal, trustworthy” workforce.
Musk’s role in orchestrating what is intended to be the biggest reorganization of federal workers in decades highlights the broad influence he now enjoys across several federal agencies and the White House as his role transcends that of presidential adviser to an executor of Trump’s vision for the federal government.
When Trump tapped Musk to lead the “Department of Government Efficiency” alongside entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy after the election, it was pitched as a panel outside the government that would give nonbinding recommendations to the White House and Congress. Since then, however, Musk has burrowed inside the federal government, a shift that already has brought a striking overhaul of the workforce, and more measures apparently are underway.
In addition to the personnel office, Musk allies are now running the U.S. Digital Service, a White House office that a Trump executive order renamed the U.S. DOGE Service. Musk’s lieutenants have been interviewing the existing staff of that agency, asking detailed questions about their operations and expertise, said two other people who also spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. One area of focus, according to another person familiar with the talks: gauging workers’ views on DOGE, questions that have raised concerns of a loyalty test.
The new leaders also have brought a heavy focus on engineering, keeping some workers long after their interviews to perform coding exercises, the person said.
Meanwhile, at least one of Musk’s private business associates has joined the General Services Administration, which oversees federal buildings. The new director of Technology Transformation Services - a part of the GSA responsible for enabling access to government services - worked for eight years at Tesla, Musk’s electric car company. Workers in that division have been told they need to share some of their recent work, the person said, which some interpreted to mean their computer code. (Musk’s team made similar requests of staff after taking over Twitter, now called X.) The technology workers were expected to sit this week for one-on-one discussions mirroring those at the U.S. DOGE Service. (The New York Times also reported Wednesday on some of the personnel involved and that the GSA has emerged as Musk’s likely next target.)
The extent of Musk’s imprint could deepen questions about the legality and credibility of the resignation offer to the civil service. Musk and the OPM have said workers who resign will be paid through Sept. 30, will not have to return to in-person work and will mostly be permitted to take administrative leave. But many federal employees fear their agencies won’t honor those promises.
Top political officials at the White House budget office were not consulted about the offer, several people familiar with the matter said. Neither were the agency’s career staff. The career staff at the OPM also were not involved in drafting the proposal, the people said.
Spokespeople for the OPM, the budget office and DOGE declined to comment. Musk did not respond to a request for comment.
[What federal workers should know about Trump administration’s ‘deferred resignation’ offer]
The email sent by the OPM - titled “Fork in the Road,” echoing the one sent by Musk to Twitter employees in late 2022 - instructed workers to reply “resign” if they wanted to accept the offer, which expires Feb. 6. Most civil servants are eligible, but military personnel, members of the U.S. Postal Service, and those in positions related to immigration enforcement and national security will be exempt, the OPM said in a memo. The personnel office also gave agency directors discretion to exclude specific positions - but later told them to set a high bar for exceptions, focused on national security.
The Trump administration called the offer “deferred resignation,” deliberately rejecting the term “buyout” to avoid suggesting that workers would get lump sum payments instead of or on top of their regular salaries, an OPM spokesperson said. Musk shared a post on X saying that the administration believes up to 10 percent of the federal workforce could take the plan.
Legal experts inside and outside the government strongly criticized the approach, arguing it almost certainly violates federal law and offers few protections for workers.
The email, for instance, says workers who accept the offer will be paid through Sept. 30, the end of the federal fiscal year. But the OPM’s authority to make that offer is unclear, the experts said: Federal employees’ salaries are funded by federal agencies, not by the OPM. The administration has some limited tools to offer early retirements, but they are minimal and involve only small sums of money.
In addition, the agencies are funded only through March 14, when the government will shut down unless Congress acts to approve new spending. Promising workers payment through September is a “flat-out violation” of a 19th-century law that prevents the administration from agreeing to spend money it does not have, said David Super, an administrative law professor at Georgetown University.
These questions have fueled a sense of unease among federal employees weighing the offer. On one hand, many are exhausted by the chaos of Trump’s first week back in office and the criticism directed their way. But, in interviews with The Washington Post, more than a dozen federal workers who received the email also expressed skepticism about the terms, fearing that the Trump administration could not be trusted to pay any wages or benefits promised to those who agree to depart. They spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution at a time when Trump has moved to make it easier to fire federal employees.
Hours after the email blast, unions and Democratic lawmakers started to warn federal workers not to accept the offer, with Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Virginia) declaring on the Senate floor that Trump could “stiff you.” Even before the offer went out, federal employees sued the OPM when the agency began sending mass test emails from the “hr@opm.gov” address that later sent the resignation offer. The complaint filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia alleges that the email system poses security risks for the workers’ personal information.
“What guarantee does an employee who might take this offer have of actually receiving payment? When there is government immunity, no budget, and Congress can declare this illegal?” said Sheria Smith, head of the union that represents Education Department employees.
Those fears may have merit: Musk’s companies have reneged on commitments to workers in the past. During the covid-19 pandemic in 2020, Tesla gave employees permission to remain at home if they did not feel comfortable reporting to its factory but later sent termination notices to some of them alleging “failure to return to work.”
In 2022, Musk denied that he aimed to lay off 75 percent of the Twitter staff - plans first reported by The Post - but later proceeded to gut the company’s workforce by 80 percent. After he took over the company, Twitter also was sued over its alleged failure to pay millions in rent.