The Trump administration’s generous buyout offer has reportedly enticed over 20,000 workers from our extremely bloated federal government to accept one last payout from We the People before exiting.
Trump’s administration insists that federal workers either return to working in person and uphold administration policy and the Constitution or take a generous package that reportedly includes up to eight months of pay and benefits. More than 20,000 workers have already accepted the offer. The only unfortunate part is that this represents less than 1% of the entire federal workforce (although more are expected to take the deal in the coming days).
Yes, that’s right, the federal government in America employs around 3 million people. Numbers went up significantly under the Biden-Harris administration as it tried to mask horrible job numbers with reckless hiring sprees. Economist EJ Antoni announced in January, “More than half of all net job growth in '24 was either direct or indirect hiring by gov't, in other words, paid for w[ith] taxpayer dollars,” an obviously unsustainable situation.
The number of people employed by the government rose by 438k in '24, an unsustainable rate of increase that has also artificially depressed the unemployment rate at taxpayer expense: pic.twitter.com/KeVQeKaVKC
— E.J. Antoni, Ph.D. (@RealEJAntoni) January 10, 2025
In 1795, when our first president George Washington was in office, more people were employed at his Mount Vernon estate than in the whole executive branch of the U.S. federal government. Washington, who believed in a strong but strictly limited federal government, would be absolutely appalled at the unconstitutional and authoritarian size of our federal government now.
From the New York Post on Feb. 4:
Thousands of federal workers have accepted the Trump administration’s buyout offer — taking eight months’ pay and benefits in exchange for walking away from the government workforce, The Post has learned.
Employees have until Thursday to decide whether to accept the offer, which the White House hopes will reduce the federal payroll by between 5% and 10%.
Axios first reported Tuesday that close to 20,000 federal workers had accepted the offer, an amount representing less than 1% of government personnel.
A White House official informed the Post, “I can tell you the 20K number isn’t current, the number of deferred resignations is rapidly growing, and we’re expecting the largest spike 24 to 48 hours before the deadline.”
Related: U.S. Taxpayers Now on Hook for $36.2T
The goal is ultimately to save taxpayers some $100 billion by cutting between 5% and 10% of the federal workforce. And goodness knows, with the national debt growing all the time, we need to start cutting expenses. Not to mention the economic cost of bloated bureaucracy — each federal regulator, for instance, is estimated to cost the U.S. economy over 130 jobs and $11 million annually.
Some federal jobs are necessary; some are constitutional; most are neither. Hopefully, we will see many tens of thousands more woke, useless federal employees take the Trump administration buyout this week, loosening the government stranglehold on American prosperity.
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