Federal worker buyout resembles a failed SpaceX launch
Civil servants offered wealth and happiness if they leave town now. Maybe. Could be.
By Sam Bellamy
I’ve long marveled at the fact that humans sleep roughly one-third of their lives yet still wreak so much havoc. The key to this success, of course, is that we destroy in shifts.
The Trump administration, it appears, doesn’t need to work in shifts. Or, despite the recent addition of sofa beds at the Office of Personnel Management by Elon Musk, even sleep.
Wanton destruction is a way of life – a calling, really – for the MAGA men and women flamethrowing their way through our nation’s capital, rendering every institution they enter crispy and unrecognizable.
Elon Musk and minions from his various companies – including SpaceX, Tesla and a tunneling company called, humbly, The Boring Company – have essentially launched a hostile takeover of the federal government.
This takeover is occurring under the auspices of the Department of Government Efficiency, a department that doesn’t exist, was never approved by Congress, has no visible oversight and is run by people who are not government employees and may or may not be getting paid by us, Musk or, for all we know, Vladimir Putin.
Earlier this week – which feels like at least a year ago in Trump time – the Musk-occupied Office of Personnel Management sent a chipper email, subject line “Fork in the Road,” to all federal employees offering them a chance to resign now, leave as soon as possible and collect a paycheck through the end of September.
The email provided instructions on how to declare interest in quitting and generously provided a resignation letter to make it all snazzy. Those who agreed to quit would receive “a dignified, fair departure from the federal government.”
Former employees of Twitter who were jettisoned during Musk’s takeover of the social platform told Axios that the email was strikingly similar to one they received before they were kicked to the curb. They, too, were promised a severance package but said it never materialized.
Sen. Tim Kaine, a Democrat from Virginia, sensibly warned federal workers to be careful about accepting an offer from Trump, a man notorious for stiffing contractors on his development projects.
Federal employees, it seems, were already onto the scam. The New York Times detailed the response of one worker: “Already signed on to the buyout! All it took was me buying a Trumpcoin and one Trump Bible, and my voucher for 8 months of salary (in Mar-a-Lago Bucks) is in the mail!”
Perhaps sensing – what? – low morale and ridicule, the Musk-occupied Office of Personnel Management followed up with another email on Thursday.
This, mind you, was the very day Trump and J.D. Vance, among others, revealed to the world that this week’s deadly plane crash outside D.C. and a whole lot of other messes were caused by an Obama-era decision that the federal government was “too white,” leading to the hiring of all manner of incompetents of the black, female, disabled, gay and transgender variety under ridiculous diversity, equity and exclusion policies.
The follow-up email declared, “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 email, sounding a bit like a commercial from a luxury cruise line, informs federal employees they could use their big farewell paycheck to take a vacation at a “dream destination.”
The putsch went further. Senior officials at the Office of Personnel Management say they’ve been locked out of the federal payroll system, control of which was wrested away by Musk’s crew after a standoff with a top Treasury official, David Lebryk, this week. He was abruptly put on leave, then retired.
The system is used for payments to federal workers and issuance of Social Security checks and tax refunds, among other things. It contains sensitive personal information on millions of Americans.
“We have no visibility into what they are doing with the computer and data systems,” one of the OPM officials told Reuters. “That is creating great concern. There is no oversight. It creates real cybersecurity and hacking implications.”
Well, yeah. For starters.
One of Musk’s helpers, interestingly, is a fellow named Brian Bjelde, who is SpaceX’s vice president of human resources.
As I now routinely do when I encounter a name in Trump world that I hadn’t seen before, I typed this guy’s name into Google, followed by the word “controversy.” Needless to say, there are always results and almost always of the sordid kind.
Among the top hits was an article from Bloomberg, recounting familiar stories about the numerous sexual harassment lawsuits and complaints filed against Musk, his employees, and his companies.
In one passage, the Bloomberg piece also details a 10-minute parody video once shown to workers during a holiday party:
“… a narrator chides a staffer who’s just grabbed her colleague Brian Bjelde’s butt. ‘We have a very strict sexual-harassment policy,’ the voiceover intones, ‘and you’ve got to get it right.’ Cut to the same woman practicing her harassment technique on Bjelde, who’s now SpaceX’s vice president for human resources. While he faces an office wall, hands over his head, she spanks him several more times, and another woman helps her refine her form, like a golfer. The eventual punch line is a freeze-frame of her hand on Bjelde’s bum accompanied by a chime and a green check mark, indicating that her harassment now meets with company approval.”
This Bjelde guy must be one of the “best and brightest” that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth promised Trump would bring into the federal government during this week’s press conference.
Trouble is, Bjelde doesn’t really work for the federal government, there’s absolutely no oversight of his activities, and he’s part of a team that has access to a federal payroll system filled with confidential information that actual government employees hired to run that system can no longer get into.
We have a shortage of air traffic controllers, among other problems, that requires the full focus and attention of experienced, knowledgeable, sober people who are actually interested in fixing problems rather than making them. Non-Hegseths, basically. But let’s “encourage” more of those people to leave.
Yep, this is America, great again.
Just don’t look up. And, no matter your gender, you might want to be on the lookout for the best and brightest getting a little handsy.