If you held out for a RIF rather than taking the fork in the road, you may have an extra layer of protection

Eric White: Absolutely. So like I said in my intro, a lot of uncertainty. I’m sure that you have colleagues and folks that you know who may have even been considering taking the fork in the road offer that the Office of Personnel Management put forth or just resigning overall. What would you do?

Shauna Weatherly: Well, I think it would depend on where I was in my career, right? Toward the end of my career, I would have just optioned out for the voluntary retirement and then I would have or maybe even a deferred retirement, depending on what my situation was. But there are a lot of people sitting in a bubble right now that don’t qualify for a VERA because they don’t have the age or the number of years or aren’t ready to retire, frankly, for whatever reason, financial or other.

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Eric White: Gotcha. All right. And so what is it for those folk waiting around, knowing that something is going to come down the pipeline that may end up terminating their position and may think, ‘Well, let me just get out of here and get a fresh start right away.’ But you’re saying not so fast. You have other options.

Shauna Weatherly: Yeah. I mean, depending on where you sit in your career, the fork in the road option may have been a really good one if you’re early in your career, you’re in a certain job category or industry where there’s a lot of opportunity outside federal space and also depending on where you live. But if you’re sitting in one of those bubble situations, sticking around and waiting to go through a roof is not always a bad idea because there are protections that come with that. There’s Priority Placement (Program) and things like that if you are otherwise furloughed, I guess, this what they usually say. And you get a RIF notice and those protections help you then come back into federal service later down the road because the government will be hiring off those priority placement lists for a very long time afterwards because of those protections.

Eric White: And not to mention with a RIF you have a laid out sort of stipulations of why you were chosen and if you feel as if there was a mistake made and you may have some legal recourse there, but that all goes out the window as well if you resign.

Shauna Weatherly: Yeah. If you resign, you give up all those options, right? If you voluntarily resign. But if you go through this process and somehow your adjudication of your personnel record and your standing in your tenure group and all those things comes out incorrect for any reason. Yeah, you could have a possible case in order to be reinstated.

Eric White: We’re speaking with Shauna Weatherly. She’s the president and founder of Federal Subcontract Solutions. And we don’t need to turn this into a PowerPoint presentation or anything. But yeah, when it comes to RIFs, there are a lot of stipulations there. What are some of the top procedures that come into place of how managers select who they are going to furlough? Obviously, probably the hardest part of the job, but at least it is a lot of boxes to be checked and things like that.

Shauna Weatherly: Yeah. Well they go through a situation where they look at positions that may need to be filled or abolished or even positions that are already vacated. And they’ll look at that and kind of do that reorganization first typically. And then what you have is you’ll have each agency establishes a RIF team to actually set a competitive area for the RIF, which is usually based on organizational units and geographic locations. And then they’ll establish competitive levels, which is based on people in the same grades or occupational series, things like that, similar duties and qualifications. And they’ll go through with your personnel file, which is the basis of what they use for the RIF determination is your OPF records and they will prepare the registration and retention registers, which then decide where people are slotted in and where they aren’t for potential retention or RIF.

Eric White: All right. So you’re a federal employee at an agency that you’ve very publicly heard targeted by the administration. You’re starting to see some folks that aren’t showing up. And you know that RIFs are coming in. What is it that an employee in that situation should do if they are going to bear down and wait to see what happens?

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Shauna Weatherly: Well, I think the first thing is you need to make sure you’ve got a copy of your personnel file so that you yourself can kind of walk through the process and understand if you have tenure, what type of service appointment are you on? Do you have veteran’s preference, which also comes into play, and then some of your performance information and service credit dates, things like that, length of service. You want to be prepared to understand that so that when you get your RIF notice and you see why you were or were not retained, that you understand whether or not you were correctly retained or not. And then you know what your rights are moving forward.

Eric White: Let’s not neglect the mental part of this, which is a lot of federal employees got into federal service because they wanted to do work that matters. And it’s harder and harder to do that when you’re being, like I said, publicly castigated, but also you’re seeing some of your colleagues getting laid off. What about the mental aspect of it and how do you kind of keep your nose to the grindstone there?

Shauna Weatherly: Well, we went through RIFs in the mid-90s under the Clinton administration and I was part of the federal workforce then and I was a young federal employee. I was only in about six to eight years at the time it all started. And I was really concerned. I wondered if it was the place for me, the place to stay. I was a single mom. It put a lot of stress on me in terms of wondering how I would continue to support my family and it does distract from the job quite a bit when people are wondering when the ax is going to fall, frankly, and it’s very hard to focus. But the federal workforce is a very focused workforce, despite what people may think. And they are there to do the job. And they take that oath very seriously. So they’re doing their best under very stressful circumstances.

Eric White: Not to mention, there’s probably some relief in the fact that, well, it’s completely and utterly out of my control. So what can I do?

Shauna Weatherly: Yeah. I mean, there is some ‘I’ll take what happens and plan for the best.’ I have a daughter who’s a current federal employee and she is making her plan B arrangements, understanding that she will likely be let go. But she is one of those that I said, ‘I think you need to just wait it out and see what happens because you don’t know how that RIF register is going to fall out.’