President Trump’s administration deepened its pressure campaign on government employees to resign before a Thursday deadline, rattling and angering a civil service steeling itself for a prolonged battle with Elon Musk and his ongoing foray into the federal bureaucracy.
With hours dwindling for workers to decide whether or not to quit, agency officials held last-minute meetings to walk their teams through a dizzying barrage of emails detailing the offer to leave their jobs — and to urge them to take the deal.
The resignation push is part of a broader campaign by Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk to drastically cut the size of the federal government. On Wednesday, Mr. Musk proudly proclaimed his team’s advance into another federal agency, announcing that his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, an arm of the White House overseeing downsizing efforts, would “make rapid safety upgrades” to the nation’s air traffic control system.
The announcement came as investigators continued their probe into the Jan. 29 crash of an Army Black Hawk helicopter and an American Airlines passenger jet that killed 67 people.
Mr. Musk’s team was also spotted at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, where they obtained access to the agency’s computer systems to search for programs and staff tied to diversity policies that the Trump administration has vowed to stamp out, according to people familiar with the situation and screenshots viewed by The New York Times.
The access came as some climate data disappeared from NOAA’s website, prompting concern that political staff had interfered. Project 2025, a conservative think tank’s policy blueprint for Republicans, identified NOAA as “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry” and called for the agency to be dismantled. An agency spokesman said the web pages were unavailable because of scheduled maintenance.
The Trump administration said that tens of thousands of workers had already taken the administration’s offer to quit in exchange for a promise to be paid through the end of September — a proposal sent last week in an email with the subject line “Fork in the Road.”
On Wednesday, officials made clear that civil servants faced an uncertain future if they did not leave.
At the Education Department on Wednesday, employees who had not accepted the offer were told that the agency was considering reducing its departmental footprint.
The General Services Administration, an agency that manages the federal government’s real estate portfolio, has been particularly vocal about looming work force reductions in recent days.
In an email to some employees on Tuesday, Michael Peters, the commissioner of the agency’s public buildings service division, warned that the G.S.A. would be a “substantially smaller organization in the future.”
Mr. Peters also said the agency would take measures to significantly scale back its building portfolio, excluding space occupied by the Defense Department.
“It is clear that the footprint (leased and owned) of non-D.O.D. federal building space should be reduced by at least 50 percent,” Mr. Peters wrote.
And the Office of Personnel Management stressed to employees across the government that the clock was ticking.
“There will NOT be an extension of this program,” the agency wrote in an email on Tuesday to federal workers, using bold font to emphasize that time was running out on the offer, which expires at 11:59 p.m. on Thursday.
Unions have cautioned members not to accept the offer because they could not guarantee the Trump administration would follow through on its promises, and questioned the very legality of the proposal, which relies on the promise of funding that has not yet been appropriated by Congress.
“There is so much uncertainty right now,” said Andrew Huddleston, a spokesman for the American Federation of Government Employees. “But this is part and parcel of what the administration is doing — scare tactics and threats that jobs will be politicized or eliminated to cajole and force employees out of the civil service.”
Even if the administration was able to follow through with the terms of the deferred resignation, many workers who spoke to The Times said they were likely to decline it because of the sense of mission they feel to serve the American public for as long as possible.
Many employees simply expressed disgust and anger at the push to drive them out.
“I have a deep sense of alienation and abandonment here,” said one worker who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation. “This is an unreasonable situation with unreasonable people.”
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Wednesday that Mr. Trump had campaigned on the promise “to look at the receipts of this federal government and ensure it’s accountable to American taxpayers.”
“That’s all that is happening here,” she continued.
Some employees sought ways to push back.
On Wednesday, workers at the Technology Transformation Services, the tech-focused arm of the General Services Administration, made known their displeasure with the “Fork in the Road” offer during an organization-wide meeting with their new leader, a former employee at Mr. Musk’s automaker Tesla, according to people familiar with the gathering.
In the meeting, Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer who was appointed to lead technology efforts at the G.S.A., attempted to assuage worries about the deferred resignation plan and told workers to “read as much as you can” about the offer, according to an audio recording provided to The New York Times. He also urged federal workers to review information posted on the website of the Office of Personnel Management.
His assurances did not appear to work. Employees in the tech division rained down spoon emojis in the chat that accompanied the video meeting, which was watched by more than 600 people, according to photos of the chat screen provided to The Times and three people familiar with the reaction. Some employees also added spoon emojis to their statuses on Slack, a workplace communication app.
On Wednesday afternoon, several hundred demonstrators gathered outside the Labor Department to protest the Trump administration’s moves. Printed signs read “Stop the billionaire takeover” and “Nobody elected Musk.”
“What he’s trying to do is essentially destroy our agencies, destroy the social safety net and then take all of that hard-earned wealth of working-class people from across the country and redistribute it to his billionaire friends and his own company,” said Representative Robert Garcia, Democrat of California.
Federal employee unions said the effort to cut the work force had led more federal employees to join their ranks. The American Federation of Government Employees, which started the year with about 300,000 dues-paying members, said it had welcomed more than 13,000 new workers in January. More than 4,300 federal employees enrolled in the first five days of February — a month in which union membership had held steady or dipped slightly in each of the past three years.
Ryan Mac, Kate Conger, Ana Swanson Madeleine Ngo, Zach Montague, Kate Kelly, Rebecca Davis O’Brien, Mark Walker and Chris Cameron contributed reporting.
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