Not cool: Responding to a tragic accident in the dark and cold, while knowing your inbox has an email asking to resign from federal service.
It will likely be days or weeks before we know for certain the chain of events that led to the mid-air crash 300 feet above the Potomac River. When we do, it will be thanks to painstaking work by experienced investigators at the National Transportation Safety Board. They were on scene in the dark and cold, hard by the 33-degree river. And they, just like every other federal responder on scene, had received an email just two days earlier asking them to resign from the government.
The National Park Police helping fish bodies out of the river? They’d received the email.
The air traffic controllers on duty and their supervisors had also received the email. Does anyone think we have too many of them? Tower recordings were posted online just hours after the crash. Good Lord, listen to the steely calmness with which they dealt with other airplanes in the area, seconds after seeing the collision just a few hundred yards away!
How about the Transportation Security Administration folks who had to deal with the situation in the airport itself, closed for more than 12 hours until yesterday morning. The FBI will aid the NTSB in the investigation. Employees there also got the email.
Hearing that Homeland Security Secretary Kristy Noem and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy were on scene, I thought: Do they have even a twinge of doubt over the efficacy of that klutzy email?
The Trump administration publicly estimated that 100,000 or 200,000 people will take the offer, or up to 10% of the federal workforce. Doubtful. For a variety of reasons, real and imagined, federal employees say they simply don’t trust it. One basic worry stems from the possibility that the 8 months of promised pay, during which resigners don’t work, could get an unfavorable court ruling. Imagine if the resignation held, but the pay didn’t.
Others worry, also justifiably, about their annuity if they are close to or at an eligible retirement point. Still another basic worry: What if I sign up for deferred resignation, and I get fired two weeks later anyway?
To its credit, OPM put up a FAQ page. It answers about a tenth of the real questions employees have.
On whether you keep accruing retirement benefits while on deferred resignation, it states this: “Yes. You will continue to accrue retirement benefits during the deferred resignation period. Should you elect to retire (either early retirement or normal retirement) before your final resignation date, your retirement election will override the deferred resignation.”
But then there’s this. In response to what happens if a resigned employee’s retirement eligibility occurs shortly after the September 30th resignation date: “Your agency will review any such requests on a case-by-case basis and may extend a waiver to accommodate reasonable requests.” That doesn’t sound very reassuring. Better, since OPM is in legally questionable territory in the first place, would be to establish a 90-day after-resignation period for filing for retirement. At least in my opinion.
A word about some feds who didn’t a chance to take even deferred resignation. Namely the 17-odd inspectors general who were let go by email last Friday. They didn’t get the “dignity” promised to recipients of the deferred resignation email.
One jokey theory going around holds that the administration mixed up its “keep” and “fire” lists. Many of the IG’s not let go were appointed by the Obama and Biden administrations. Many who were let go were Trump appointees from his first term.
One Trump appointee left in place, oddly, was Homeland Security IG Jim Cuffari. The IGs’ own community just in October sent to the White House a thousand-page investigative report about Cuffari. In Washington parlance, you could call the report “scathing.” The Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE) found that Cuffari abused his authority, in part by “expending $1.393 million of taxpayer funds to hire a private law firm to investigate three former senior members of his staff, most likely for his ‘personal’ interest and in order to retaliate against them.”
The IGs have a tight community. They know one another, and believe they have a special calling. They’re indifferent to administration or agency policy. They say they simply investigate and audit the programs that are in place. So of all the changes underway by the Trump administration, this one stands out as odd.
Trump said yesterday he wants only the most “talented” and intellectually proficient people doing air traffic control. He used the word “genius.” Even an FAA staffed with geniuses can benefit from dispassionate IG oversight.
Trump likened the dismissal of IGs to the routine dismissals of U.S. attorneys. That’s not a good analogy. IG’s have dotted line responsibility to Congress, and they set their audit agendas without direction from their agency heads. President Trump must realize that if he’s serious about performance, independent inspectors general can be the administration’s most important tool. But not if they have to avoid giving bad news.
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Tom Temin is host of the Federal Drive and has been providing insight on federal technology and management issues for more than 30 years.
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