Taking An Axe to Government Employees, Feds Cancel Freeze Memo

Saying nothing is worse than saying the wrong thing. Just start fighting back and we’ll figure out the rest later. - (h/t Dan Pfeiffer)

It was another day of chaos in the country, just like the anti-government forces currently in power envision. I know that sentence may seem like a contradiction, but I ask if anybody’s seen anything positive coming out of the White House.

The bad news is that Democratic elected officials are muted in their responses. The good news is that Trump V 2.0 is showing signs of disorganization from within.

A letter to all Federal Employees seemingly offered what some media inaccurately described as a buyout. It had the same header as the memo Musk sent to Twitter employees after he bought the company: “A Fork in the road.”

With Elon Musk riding herd at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM),–prior to Project 2025’s Architect Russel Vought being confirmed as Director– a huge scam is in progress, something called deferred resignation. The goal is to reduce the overall government workforce, along with encouraging people the administration believes oppose its agenda to “self-deport.”

The idea that this program is some sort of “buy out” as it’s being referred to in media reports is flat-out wrong. Even OPM is not calling this a buyout. It’s their expectation that eligible employees who accept this offer will be placed on administrative leave, with full pay and benefits, until the separation date of 9/30/25

Counting the “clarifications,” there are now three memos concerning this program, each with poorly-disguised language conceivably leading to loopholes where Federal employees would either be not eligible or required to stay in place according to supervisorial needs. Taking the "deferred resignation" offer doesn’t sever employment with the agency and they can still assign work if a higher up deems it necessary.

Some of the (OPM) memos sent to federal workers about firing, hiring freezes, and mandatory return to office demands are attributable to former employees of the Heritage Foundation and other conservative think tanks with longstanding loyalties to President Donald Trump. The senders of the memos failed to scrub the metadata from those documents, making it easy for anyone to reveal the listed authors of the memos.

But mostly this is the handiwork of Elon Musk. During the Trump Presidential campaign, Musk promised a voluntary-retirement program for federal workers that would pay them for 2 years. Now it’s nine months maximum.

It’s relevant here to recall the “Fork in the road” memo at Twitter. Employees who accepted that offer are still fighting in court to get the promised pay and benefits. In some cases, Twitter employees who had quit were later called and asked to reconsider staying. Meanwhile, the social media company has lost 80% of its market value. I’m not sure that is the kind of shrinkage even traditional conservatives have in mind.

There are questions about funding for the program, along with the legal niceties of this sort of agency pruning. Federal agencies are limited by law to a max $25K payout in the case of restructuring.

Here’s a snip from Sen Tim Kaine’s speech about the deferred resignation program.

• "He's tricked hundreds of people with that offer. If you accept that offer and resign, he'll stiff you just like he stiffed the contractors. He doesn't have any authority to do this. Do not be fooled by this guy

Unions and associations representing Federal employees have uniformly informed their charges that they should not sign the deferred retirement paperwork. And the chatter on social media platforms from purported Federal workers is that the questionable offer has had the opposite of its intended effect, with some saying they’ve put off exiting their positions just to spite the Trump administration.

Federal employees are getting messages via their agency’s emergency notification system, which is usually reserved for snow-related office closures: DO NOT RESPOND TO THAT EMAIL UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, WE HAVE NO IDEA IF ANY OF THOSE PROMISES ARE REAL

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The Dear Leader’s Federal Funding Freeze got messy very quickly. Now, ”M-25-13” has been rescinded. I can only hope people remember all the Republican hot air expended defending the indefensible.

The original memo said ALL programs, excepting those providing direct assistance to Americans. That promise turned out to be not true, as payment portals for Medicaid and Head Start funding were frozen.

Via the New York Times,(Gift Link) look at what’s on the chopping block:

• The order, temporarily blocked by a federal judge as it was set to go into effect, was circulated alongside a spreadsheet of about 2,600 programs now under review, spanning virtually every federal initiative that distributes money — even some, like Medicare, that officials said would not be affected.

• Below is a list of all those programs, identified by the Office of Management and Budget for examination to ensure they do not “advance Marxist equity, transgenderism and Green New Deal social engineering policies.” Agencies were asked to answer questions about each budget line, including “Does this program promote gender ideology?”

• The Trump administration has insisted that direct payments to Americans are not at risk. But the list named numerous programs that aid millions of individual Americans, like Medicaid and Head Start, but that are funded first as grants to states, local governments or nonprofits. On Tuesday, some grant recipients reported interruptions. We’ve highlighted some programs where those interruptions in funding have already been reported or where budget officials have said no freeze will take place.

UPDATE: White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt says “This is not a recession of the funding freeze.” Except that the OMB Memo was the execution order of Trump’s illegal and unconstitutional federal funding freeze. So now, nobody’s been ordered to do anything about Trump’s mutterings. The bs never ends…

Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s DOGE agency was on social media claiming they’re already saving taxpayers a billion dollars a day. These messages take me back to the days of Soviet proclamations about how much wheat production had risen in the past year: they're unaudited, uncheckable declarations that could just as easily say DOGE is saving the government $5 billion a day.

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What about those opposing the Trump administration’s actions? From what I saw across media platforms on Tuesday, the funding freeze in particular upset a lot of people. Regardless of its withdrawal, I think it’s sensitized people to just how bad the Project 2025 version of Trump really is. I think the voices that spoke up made a difference. Dollar Store Nazi/ White House aide Stephen Miller certainly had a public tantrum about the negative response.

You’d think elected Democrats might want to do more than tsk, tsk about the Trump administration’s moves, but you would be wrong. As Senate Schumer demonstrated at a morning press conference, the current Dem leadership strategy is to use strong language but not do shit.

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Doug’s Truth Squad quiz…

T or F? ICE just announced it is pausing the hotline where people can call to report undocumented immigrants because 90% of the calls are from people reporting Elon Musk.

T or F? Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt: "DOGE and OMB also found that there was about to be 50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza. That is a preposterous waste of taxpayer dollars."

T or F? Colombian officials said that of more than 200 people deported yesterday, none had committed crimes. Instead, there were more than a dozen kids and two pregnant women. The migrants themselves said U.S. officials had mistreated them: “despotic, humiliating…”

T or F? Trump's global aid freeze has cut the salaries paid to many of the prison & camp guards responsible for securing 9,500 ISIS militants & ~40,000 associated women/kids in northeast Syria. Many are no longer turning up for work.

(Answers: F, F, T, T)

The Fight for Midlife and Menopausal Health is Essential to Reproductive Rights—and Democracy by Jennifer Weiss-Wolf at The Contrarian

• Perhaps you’ve seen the headlines: menopause is having a moment, from this month’s new tell-all books by Brooke Shields and Naomi Watts to viral clips of Halle Berry shouting from the steps of the U.S. Capitol: “I’m in menopause, OK?!” Commitment goes well beyond celebrity moments and includes notable support from public policy leaders across the spectrum—Democrats and Republicans in Congress, and in blue and red states. These prominent voices are part of a new wave of recognition that menopausal women deserve to make informed choices about our bodies. Just as the fight for reproductive rights is an essential tenet of any free and fair democracy, so too is autonomy and health at this life stage.

• Enter A Citizen’s Guide to Menopause Advocacy, a new digital resource featuring a dozen leading health experts. (I am a co-author of the Citizen’s Guide, together with Dr. Mary Claire Haver; Maria Shriver wrote the foreword.) Our goal? To mobilize everyday people failed by the nation’s longstanding lack of investment in and commitment to mid-life and menopausal healthcare. In the words of leading neuroscientist and Citizen’s Guide contributor Dr. Lisa Mosconi: “Menopause remains one of the most under-diagnosed, under-researched, under-treated, and under-funded fields in medicine. We owe women centuries of research.”

• Women’s representation in scientific research has been historically woeful. (Up until 1993 there were no laws requiring that women be included in clinical trials.) According to the most recent National Institutes for Health (NIH) annual budget review, less than ten percent is dedicated to women’s health, according to an analysis by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The first year the NIH ever tracked its menopause-related spending was 2023. The total amount? Just over one percent.

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Greenlanders overwhelmingly oppose becoming part of the United States, poll shows Via Reuters

• An opinion poll indicated that 85% of Greenlanders do not wish their Arctic island - a semi-autonomous Danish territory - to become a part of the United States, with nearly half saying they see interest by U.S. President Donald Trump as a threat.

• Trump said earlier this month that Greenland was vital to U.S. security and Denmark should give up control of the strategically important island.

• The survey by pollster Verian, commissioned by the Danish newspaper Berlingske and Greenlandic daily Sermitsiaq, showed only 6% of Greenlanders are in favour of their island becoming part of the U.S., with 9% undecided.

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One simple trick to reverse the falling birth rate by Lyz at Men Yell At Me

• Cutting off access to abortion and birth control, forcing women out of public life and back into the home — all these measures are justified as a way to support American families and increase the birth rate. But there is no evidence those things will increase the birth rate.

• What this is about, what it has always been about is forcing women out of public life. And it also forces fathers out of family life.

• This is always the point people miss: Rolling back women’s rights hurts all people. Women’s advancement doesn’t mean men lose. Women being forced back into the home doesn’t mean men win. It just means everyone loses.