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Has the DOGE Buyout/Firing Campaign Been Setup for This Year's US Budget Negotiations?
In 'culture war developments easily missed in interesting times,' around 60% of the US Department of Justice Civil Rights Division is expected to resign rather than stick around for the Trump administration's change of focus on civil rights priorities.
To quote the set-up...
Over a 100 is vague. 100 lawyers isn't cheap, but scale matters. How does this compare to the office?
140 of 380 is a 37% retention rate.
63% turnover is an organizational-culture-destroying amount. Just in terms of base-load responsibilities dropped as no longer supportable, an organization is fundamentally changed on what the members expect to do. If the organizational mission shifts...
Newsweek's 'Why It Matters' frames the difference in focus.
Obviously the framings are their own, and may / may not properly characterize what was done / what will be done.
This article, and a few others this week as the second-round buyout tallies come in, are raising the implications of the upcoming US federal... 'exodus' is probably too strong a term, though appropriate in the DOJ Civil Rights division. 'Buyout' is more accurate
You may remember the initial DOGE buy-out from February, which about 75,000 Federal Employees took. The general offer was pay and benefits through September, the end of the fiscal year. This was less than the desired target (about 3.5% of work force to a 5-10% target), and was part of the general legal injunctions as it and other firing actions were taken to court.
Last month, the Trump administration offered a second round of buyouts, and media reporting from the last week suggests the court-confusion / insecurities / etc. have let more to take the offer. In the USDA, less than 4,000 took the initial buyout offer, but over 11,000 have taken the second. It's unclear how typical this is- I didn't find many first and second round stats at this time- but it does suggest that the last three months have increased, not decreased, the Trump administration's ability to shake the federal bureacracy.
A (non-supportive) Politico E&E article reviewing different agencies affected emphasizes not just numbers, but levels of departees, with an emphasis on more senior personnel. While the article emphasizes ways that will hurt Trump's policy agendas, I suspect many of the red tribe will see this 'problems' more ranging from 'acceptable costs' to 'good.'
For example, when the article raises-
-I suspect the Trumpian right doubts the personnel lost would have supported rather than undermined Trump's agenda anyway. That may be an inaccurate doubt, or at least not universally justified across every buy-out departee, but it is a foreseeable consequence of the Resistance strategy played in the first trump administration.
Other quotable quotes by agency include-
Overall, Reuters estimates that about 260,000 federal workers- over a quarter of a million- have been fired, taken a buyout, or retired early since Trump came into office.
So, what else does this mean, besides an increase in job applications for DOGE-scrutinized federal workers?
I think this buy-out process is best understood in a similar light- as a deliberate culture-change strategy to change the institutional culture of the Executive Branch administrative state. You can even see the outlines a corporate turnover strategy.
I've noted before the organizational-culture implications of the Trump administration trying to relocate federal agencies out of the hyper-blue DC area to other places in the country.
I submit that the current government curtailment efforts look to have been part of a deliberate phased process to reach this buy-out point in preparation for the mid-2025 budget negotiations.
End-Jan: At the end of January (29Jan), the initial buyout-offer was made and set to expire on 6 Feb. This was the initial offer. It would receive some court resistance. As previously addressed, it didn't get as much traction as the Administration wanted.
Feb: February is the month of DOGE fear, starting with the USAID takedown. I wrote in February about how the takedown and releases were enabled by the dual-hatting mechanics of Secretary of State Rubio becoming USAID director. This was a unique legal dynamic due to USAID's specific legal structure, but it served to create insecurity in the work force. Similar dynamics like the OPM '5 bullets' email. Requirements for complaince build credibility in DOGE-threats.
March: Transition from DOGE-fear to Secretary Management. In mid-march, Trump signals that DOGE will take a supporting role to the department heads. This was conveyed in the time as Musk having his wings clipped. How much was stage-managed kabuki theater is up for debate. Regardless, Department heads are now 'backed by' DOGE-threats, without having had to make the threats themselves.
March-April: Early Trump lawfare as efforts at initial cuts / firings / etc. are resisted in public and in the courts. While courts create setbacks for Trump, this actually increases uncertainty overall. Trump is able to get enough wins enough of the time such that the threat of reductions in force (RIFs) / future firings are credible.
April: Buyout 2.0 offered. The anti-Trump resistance in the courts gets ominous foreshadowing that the Supreme Court may strictly limit the sort of injunctions being used to stop Trump's federal efforts. As the public chaos / pressure over jobs occurs, more federal employees take the buyout.
May: On 1 May, Trump announces his budget priorities for FY 2026. This includes cutting $163 billion from various US government programs, with the NYT choosing its highlights.
May now: Here we are
So, where does the clickbait title come in?
Basically, the next few months are the typical annual US budget negotiation season. Its far from the only thing going on, but the first federal budget of a new president is kind of a big deal. It's where the new administration goes from inheriting the policy priorities of the previous administration to making their own, and this year in particular is the start of a (probably brief) Republican trifecta. The US entered a (somewhat surprising) rest-of-the-year budget stability when back in March Senate Minority Leader Schumer decided to support Trump's spending bill out of concern of the increased power Trump would get if there was no budget or only continuing resolutions.
I bring this up now, because the DOGE-Buyout plan is, itself, a lever / tool in the next year budget cycle, where Congress discusses not just budgets, but manpower authorizations for agencies.
Government shutdown politics change when there a quarter-of-a-million fewer federal employees suddenly out of work and not getting paid. Federal employees out of work are free to do stuff. Ex-Federal employees go on with their non-federal jobs. The bigger the federal bureacracy, the more painful it is to get into these kind of fights. On the other hand, the smaller, the easier.
Position vacancies are also a big implication for program cuts. It's politically easier for Congressional negotiators to cut billets / positions / parts of agencies that are currently (or will be predictably) empty than parts that are filled. Part of the reason few things are as hard to end as a temporary government program is because there is a person whose job is on the line, and a department supervisor whose authorities / money / personal influence network hinges on the people they have. These are not the only obstacles, but they are diminished when relevant leaders take a buyout and aren't there to advocate to the death.
This is particularly true when partisans negotiate over politically sensitive institutions that a former partisan 'owner' may or may not want to see fall into 'enemy hands.' The DOJ Civil Rights Division, for example, has a reputation for being Democrat-aligned in political sympathies. It was 380 lawyers, and is expected to go down to 180 lawyers. That is a 200-lawyer gap.
Does an arch-progressive true-blue Democrat really want to insist in the DOJ-authorization bill that Trump must hire 200 lawyers to get back to 380 lawyers? Even though that will almost certainly mean 200 red-tribe lawyers who now form a majority of the civil rights division?
Or do they maybe feel that 180 mostly-old-guard lawyers are preferable, and deny Trump the influence of reshaping CRD composition? Hoping that- next presidency- they can re-expand the government service?
Even if that happens, my final point is that nothing that's going on right now is so easily reversed as the next administration in 4 years simply going 'reverse all that.' Even if an alternate Democratic trifecta emerges with the next Dem president, things will have changed.
However these dynamics play out, I suspect the Trump administration's effects will still be felt decades from now. But this year of DOGE so far has been setting the stage for the budget negotiations that will make these changes far more long-term than they would otherwise be.
(Finally- none of this is any sort of dispute / counter / negation of the warning/accusation/predictions that the federal drawdown will hinder Trump or the Republicans in predictable/unflattering/unhelpful ways in the future. To quote H. L. Mencken, Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.)
Good write-up. I’ll just offer my own personal experience here, as a federal government employee of many (10+) years.
When you disrupt people’s workplace culture and benefits, they become resentful. Apolitical and even pro-Trump employees will become opposed to the administration, and DOGE is a stupid idea for this reason. It plays to the Fox News audience well. But this will undercut Trump’s long-term efforts to reform the bureaucracy. Government services will suffer and the voting public will blame him for it.
This presumes government services provide benefits. I’m sure most government employees believe they provide a benefit (it’s hard to function believing you offer no value while getting a paycheck) but it’s possible (maybe likely) that many government programs are simply make work.
And if that’s right then DOGE is a massive successive because it proves the civil service is unnecessary and outdated.
If the law says that such-and-such projects need to get permits from the such-and-such agency after such-and-such analysis, then reducing the staff issuing those permits is increasing the burden of the government, not decreasing it.
This is probably true, but many of those same sorts of staff are the ones writing regulations requiring new types of permits. You can go to regulations.gov and see all of the new proposed rules as they're available for comment. I'm not going to, at the moment, say that any particular rule there up for comment is "make work", but I will observe that the ensemble of all of them has definitely increased workload and doesn't seem to always actually improve things efficiently: see the Ezra Klein/Jon Stewart discussion of rural broadband spending. I could be convinced (but don't have evidence on-hand) that pausing new regulations might be a temporary win over the exponentially expanding administrative state, despite some or even most of those regulations being reasonable and well-meaning.
Indeed, my concern isn’t with those regulations, necessarily, it’s about places where Congress is mandated certain kinds of analysis and given their parties the ability to sue over it.
If the Sierra club or whoever gets to delay your project because of some administrative short coming, then either Congress is going to have to fix it or else. The agencies are gonna have to do their job.
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