By Tim Reid
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Trump administration has urged government workers to quit their “lower productivity jobs” and seek work in the private sector, and to take a vacation to a “dream destination,” sparking outrage among civil servants.
The guidance issued on Thursday night comes as President Donald Trump embarks on a massive makeover of the U.S. government, firing and sidelining hundreds of civil servants in his first steps toward downsizing the bureaucracy and installing more loyalists.
The Trump administration sent a memo to 2 million government workers on Tuesday about a “deferred resignation program” that would allow them to remain on the payroll through Sept. 30 but without having to work in person.
In the follow-up “frequently asked questions” memo on Thursday, workers were encouraged to seek a second job during the paid resignation period.
“The way to greater American prosperity is encouraging people to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector,” the memo said.
The email was sent by the Office of Personnel Management, which oversees the 2.2 million-strong civilian workforce and has been taken over by a team including former employees of Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
Another question about taking extended leave during the resignation period was answered, “You are most welcome (to) stay at home and relax or to travel to your dream destination. Whatever you would like.”
Government workers reacted with outrage in an online Reddit forum where they meet to discuss the daily upheavals to the federal bureaucracy. Many called the advice demeaning and said the memo made it less likely that they would take the offer to quit.
The moves by the Trump administration to cut the federal workforce, contained in a flurry of executive orders and other actions, have stunned and alarmed government workers and triggered turmoil inside their agencies.
“Outright insulting,” one worker wrote. Another, referring to the deadly midair collision between an Army helicopter and a passenger jet in Washington on Wednesday night, said, “I saw thousands of federal employees working at the site of a tragic plane crash today. None of them being unproductive.”
Tim Kauffman, a spokesperson for the American Federation of Government Employees, the biggest federal employees union with 800,000 members, hit out at the suggestion that government jobs are “low productivity.”
“These are people working in prisons, working on our border, working at our airports,” he told Reuters. “It’s clear they are trying to get a ton of workers to quit, to make it so miserable that they want to leave.”
(Reporting by Tim Reid in Washington; Editing by Ross Colvin and Matthew Lewis)
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