Jesus Christ it's 8:43 PM ET and the major media outlets are still claiming that OPM has offered a "buyout" to federal employees. That is not even a little bit what happened and I don't understand how they are still not aware of this.
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I squinted and couldn’t find where they offer any money. Just the option to keep working remote if you promise to quit in September. Doesn’t look like any legally binding agreement I’ve ever seen. But what do I know…
New York Times' liveblog _right now_ has this as the top headline. There are no payouts! The OPM offer is "you can quit, effective September, and be exempt from the requirement to commute to an office five days a week." That's it! https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/01/28/us/trump-news-executive-orders
This was the most misreported news item of the day (I myself didn't understand what was going on for a while) and all it made me think was how the current regime lives to create chaos and fear and not effectively govern.
There's a new OPM memo that, if you squint, allows "payout" to not necessarily be wrong. (The New York Times doesn't mention its existence, so it's an accident that they got this half-right.) The memo tells agency HR that participating employees "should" be placed on administrative leave.
I do not think it is at all correct to characterize this as a "payout" or "buyout" either, since they're simply being paid to do nothing, and that's even assuming that it plays out as claimed, which you'd be out of your mind to assume is true. The typos in the memo alone give me pause.
"We sent out an email with only a tiny percentage of the necessary information for employees to make this decision, but once they respond with a single word, they are bound by all of the further restrictions that we provided later on!"
That's not how this works! That's not how any of this works!
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https://www.opm.gov/fork
This is a terrible idea!
That's not how this works! That's not how any of this works!