#government buyout

[michigantopnews]

Michigan Attorney General Nessel Cautions Federal Employees About Misleading Buyout Offer

Attorney General Dana Nessel joins 12 state AGs in warning federal employees about OPM’s deferred resignation program. Unions say the offer is misleading and lacks legal backing.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel joins 12 state attorneys general in warning federal employees about the Trump administration’s Deferred Resignation Program. Michigan Attorney General Sounds Alarm on Controversial Federal Buyout Program LANSING, MI – Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel is cautioning federal employees in the state about a misleading deferred resignation program introduced…

[mudwerks]

You know we're in wild times when you're warning people not to take that trump "government buyout".

Because you don't want them to get scammed by the president of the united states.

[gwydionmisha]

Meanwhile, Elon Musk is illegally accessing essential government systems at places like the treasury department. Nothing good can come of it.

[newslink7com]

🚨 BREAKING: Federal Judge Blocks Trump’s Federal Worker Buyout—Thousands in Limbo as Legal Fight Erupts! 🚨

A judge has halted the Trump administration’s controversial buyout deadline for federal workers, freezing the program as legal challenges mount. With 40,000+ jobs on the line, what happens next? Court hearing set for Monday!

👉 Read the full story at NewsLink7.com

[bangavumi]

Trump Administration Offers Buyouts to Federal Employees in Effort to Downsize Government Initiative Aims to Reduce Federal Workforce by Offering Eight Months’ Salary to Voluntary Resignees �� In a significant move to reshape the federal workforce, the Trump administration has announced a “deferred resignation program” offering federal employees approximately eight months of salary to voluntarily…

[parttimereporter]

2 MILLION FEDERAL WORKERS ARE BEING OFFERED A PERMANENT BUYOUT!

[readandwriteclub]

Ah. The "end the USPS" is to permanently end the security of mail in voting, mail in ballots. Looking at countries where the government *actually* manipulates the vote count, that's how they do it so we're on that path now...

Trump "declares war on the US Postal Service"

[oneofthosecrazycatladies]

Okay a couple weeks ago I started this post trying to keep track of all the stuff going on in order to help remind us of everything that’s happened when the next election comes around. Well, because there’s just so much going on, I’ve realized trying to cram it all into one post isn’t going to work. So I’m going to do a new post every month and include links to the previous ones.

So here goes…

January 2025

February 2025

Donald Trump has enforced his tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China. [x]

Donald Trump has put Mexico tariffs on hold for one month. [x]

Donald Trump allowed Elon Musk to begin dismantling USAID. [x]

Congress is voluntarily giving up its power and allowing Trump to make unilateral decisions. [x]

Darren Beattie has been made Under Secretary of State. [x]

Everything that Donald Trump has done so far lines up with Project 2025 [x]

The White House is drafting an executive order to eliminate the Department of Education [x]

Elon Musk, who nobody voted for or elected, has, essentially, hacked the government. [x]

El Salvador has agreed to take US deportees of any nationality. [x]

US Representative Andy Biggs is proposing a bill to abolish OSHA. [x]

Pam Bondi has been confirmed as Attorney General [x]

Donald Trump doesn’t think Palestinians should return to Gaza. [x]

Donald Trump says he’ll use US troops to “take over” the Gaza Strip. [x]

A federal judge has blocked Donald Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship. [x]

Donald Trump has banned trans women from women’s sports [x]

Donald Trump sanctions the International Criminsl Court. [x]

A judge has paused the federal “buyouts” [x]

DOGE: Member of DOGE resigns [x]

DOGE has been given access to the Department of Energy. [x]

Miscellaneous news about Elon Musk [x]

DOGE is using AI to infiltrate the Department of Education [x]

Russell Vought, author of Project 2025, has been confirmed as Director of OMB [x]

Democrats in Congress have introduced the Taxpayer Data Protection Act [x]

Donald Trump has flagged the words “women” “diverse” and “historically” from studies done by the National Science Foundation. [x]

New Mexico Representative Melanie Stansbury has introduced the Nobody Elected Elon Musk Act [x]

Democratic Congressional leaders have introduced the Stop the Steal Act [x]

Donald Trump has called for a review of funding for the United Nations [x]

Federal agencies are barred from celebrating Black History Month [x]

Donald Trump has frozen aid to South Africa and accused the South African government of racism against white South Africans [x]

Donald Trump wants to use Leavenworth Prison as a migrant detention facility and have it run by a for-profit company known for its numerous human rights violations. [x] [x]

Trump has told the Treasury to stop making pennies. [x]

Representative Mark Pocan (D-WI) proposes the E.L.O.N. M.U.S.K. Act (which stands for Eliminate Looting of Our Nation by Mitigating Unethical State Kleptocracy) [x]

Employees of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau were told to stop all work and are now being told to stay home. [x]

Trump will impose 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum. [x]

Trump says Palestinians won’t be allowed back in Gaza if the US takes it over [x]

Here’s a link to the Project 2025 Policy Agenda that Donald Trump claimed he didn’t know anything about.*

*He only claimed he didn’t know anything about it after it proved to be deeply unpopular with the general public.

I’m also including directories for both the House of Representatives and the Senate. That way, if you’re so inclined, you can also track the individual actions of every Senator and Representative.

Miscellaneous News

Representative Nancy Mace (R-SC) repeatedly uses a transphobic slur on the Congressional floor. [x]

Clarence Thomas is…being Clarence Thomas *sigh* [x]

Donald Trump fired the Chair of the Kennedy Center and named himself as the new Chair [x]

Trump said that no group of people in the history of America has been treated worse than the way the January 6th insurrectionists have been treated. [x]

Once again, please feel free to let me know about anything I’ve missed. With this era of constant news we live in, it can be easy to forget so let’s give our future selves a little help!

[theonion]

Saying he was just more deadweight hampering the executive branch’s ability to function efficiently, Elon Musk confirmed Monday that he had offered himself $10 billion to resign from his position as head of President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency. “Like many other federal employees, I too have been presented with a buyout option as part of my effort to create a more streamlined and flexible government workforce,” said Musk, adding that he had given himself until Feb. 6 to accept the terms of a “dignified, fair departure” from his government position.

Full Story

[darkmaga-returns]

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper has confirmed that entire communities affected by the storm will not be rebuilt, confirming what many are calling a government “land grab” disguised as climate change adaptation.

“We’ve spent a lot of time on the way we approach rebuilding… in some areas, you just shouldn’t build back,” Governor Cooper admitted in a recent statement. He went on to reveal that the state is actively buying out entire communities, rather than helping them rebuild their homes and lives.

“We’ve been able to convince certain communities and people that buyouts are better,” he continued, justifying the controversial strategy by citing climate change as a key reason for abandoning the communities.

The governor’s admission fuels theories of a massive land grab in North Carolina, with allegations that BlackRock stands to profit from the crisis by purchasing the land, including a globally important quartz mine, for pennies on the dollar.

While Governor Cooper frames the buyouts as a practical solution to mitigate future climate risks, North Carolina residents are furious.

The buyout program is leaving families with few choices: accept government compensation and leave their homes for good, or face a future without the support to rebuild.

[dertaglichedan]

*** Asked A I if this was true:

Yes, that's true! In 1993, President Bill Clinton issued an order directing government departments and agencies with more than 100 employees to cut at least 4% of their civilian positions over three years1. In 1994, Congress approved the Federal Workforce Restructuring Act, which allowed for $25,000 buyouts for federal workers who agreed to resign and not return to federal employment for five years.

This program was part of a broader effort to downsize and restructure the federal workforce. It was a bipartisan effort and was approved by Congress after months of review1.

[mariacallous]

Federal employees are seeking a temporary restraining order as part of a class action lawsuit accusing a group of Elon Musk’s associates of allegedly operating an illegally connected server from the fifth floor of the US Office of Personnel Management’s (OPM) headquarters in Washington, DC.

An attorney representing two federal workers—Jane Does 1 and 2—filed a motion this morning arguing that the server’s continued operation not only violates federal law but is potentially exposing vast quantities of government staffers’ personal information to hostile foreign adversaries through unencrypted email.

A copy of the motion, filed in the DC District Court by National Security Counselors, a Washington-area public-interest law firm, was obtained by WIRED exclusively in advance. WIRED previously reported that Musk had installed several lackeys in OPM’s top offices, including individuals with ties to xAI, Neuralink, and other companies he owns.

The initial lawsuit, filed on January 27, cites reports that Musk’s associates illegally connected a server to a government network for the purposes of harvesting information, including the names and email accounts of federal employees. The server was installed on the agency’s premises, the complaint alleges, without OPM—the government’s human resources department—conducting a mandatory privacy impact assessment required under federal law.

Under the 2002 E-Government Act, agencies are required to perform privacy assessments prior to making “substantial changes to existing information technology” when handling information “in identifiable form.” Notably, prior to the installation of the server, OPM did not have the technical capability to email the entire federal workforce from a single email account.

“[A]t some point after 20 January 2025, OPM allowed unknown individuals to simply bypass its existing systems and security protocols,” Tuesday’s motion claims, “for the stated purpose of being able to communicate directly with those individuals without involving other agencies. In short, the sole purpose of these new systems was expediency.”

OPM did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

If the motion is granted, OPM would be forced to disconnect the server until the assessment is done. As a consequence, the Trump administration’s plans to drastically reduce the size of the federal workforce would likely face delays. The email account linked to the server—HR@opm.gov—is currently being used to gather information from federal workers accepting buyouts under the admin’s “deferred resignation program,” which is set to expire on February 6.

“Under the law, a temporary restraining order is an extraordinary remedy,” notes National Security Counselors’ executive director, Kel McClanahan. “But this is an extraordinary situation.”

Before issuing a restraining order, courts apply what’s known as the “balance of equities” doctrine, weighing the burdens and costs on both parties. In this case, however, McClanahan argues that the injunction would inflict “no hardship” on the government whatsoever. February 6 is an “arbitrary deadline,” he says, and the administration could simply continue to implement the resignation program “through preexisting channels.”

“We can't wait for the normal course of litigation when all that information is just sitting there in some system nobody knows about with who knows what protections,” McClanahan says. “In a normal case, we might be able to at least count on the inspector general to do something, but Trump fired her, so all bets are off.”

The motion further questions whether OPM violated the Administrative Procedure Act, which prohibits federal agencies from taking actions “not in accordance with the law.” Under the APA, courts may “compel agency action”—such as a private assessment—when it is “unlawfully withheld.”

Employees at various agencies were reportedly notified last month to be on the lookout for messages originating from the HR@opm.gov account. McClanahan’s complaint points to a January 23 email from acting Homeland Security secretary Benjamine Huffman instructing DHS employees that the HR@opm.gov account “can be considered trusted.” In the following days, emails were blasted out twice across the executive branch instructing federal workers to reply “Yes” in both cases.

The same account was later used to transmit the “Fork in the Road” missive promoting the Trump administration’s legally dubious “deferred resignation program,” which claims to offer federal workers the opportunity to quit but continue receiving paychecks through September. Workers who wished to participate in the program were instructed to reply to the email with “Resign.”

As WIRED has reported, even the new HR chief of DOGE, Musk’s task force, was unable to answer basic questions about the offer.

The legal authority underlying the program is unclear, and federal employee union leaders are warning workers not to blindly assume they will actually get paid. In a floor speech last week, Senator Tim Kaine advised workers not to be fooled: “There’s no budget line item to pay people who are not showing up for work.” Patty Murray, ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, similarly warned Monday: “There is no funding allocated to agencies to pay staff for this offer.”

McClanahan’s lawsuit highlights the government’s response to the OPM hack of 2015, which compromised personnel records on more than 22 million people, including some who’d undergone background checks to obtain security clearances. A congressional report authored by House Republicans following the breach pinned the incident on a “breakdown in communications” between OPM’s chief information officer and its inspector general: “The future effectiveness of the agency’s information technology and security efforts,” it says, “will depend on a strong relationship between these two entities moving forward.”

OPM’s inspector general, Krista Boyd, was fired by President Donald Trump in the midst of the “Friday night purge” on January 24—one day after the first HR@opm.gov email was sent.

“We are witnessing an unprecedented exfiltration and seizure of the most sensitive kinds of information by unelected, unvetted people with no experience, responsibility, or right to it,” says Sean Vitka, policy director at the Demand Progress Education Fund, which is supporting the action. “Millions of Americans and the collective interests of the United States desperately need emergency intervention from the courts. The constitutional crisis is already here.”

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Academic economists get big payouts when they help monopolists beat antitrust

After 40 years of rampant corporate crime, there's a new sheriff in town: Jonathan Kanter was appointed by Biden to run the DOJ Antitrust Divisoon, and he's overseen 170 "significant antitrust actions" in the past 2.5 years, culminating in a court case where Google was ruled to be an illegal monopolist:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/07/revealed-preferences/#extinguish-v-improve

Kanter's work is both extraordinary and par for the course. As Kanter said in a recent keynote for the Fordham Law Competition Law Institute’s 51st Annual Conference on International Antitrust Law and Policy, we're witnessing an epochal, global resurgence of antitrust:

https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/assistant-attorney-general-jonathan-kanter-delivers-remarks-fordham-competition-law-0

Kanter's incredible enforcement track record isn't just part of a national trend – his colleagues in the FTC, CFPB and other agencies have also been pursuing an antitrust agenda not seen in generations – but also a worldwide trend. Antitrust enforcers in Canada, the UK, the EU, South Korea, Australia, Japan and even China are all taking aim at smashing corporate monopolies. Not only are they racking up impressive victories against these giant corporations, they're stealing the companies' swagger. After all, the point of enforcement isn't just to punish wrongdoing, but also to deter wrongdoing by others.

Until recently, companies hurled themselves into illegal schemes (mergers, predatory pricing, tying, refusals to deal, etc) without fear or hesitation. Now, many of these habitual offenders are breaking the habit, giving up before they've even tried. Take Wiz, a startup that turned down Google's record-shattering $23b buyout offer, understanding that the attempt would draw more antitrust scrutiny than it was worth:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/wiz-turns-down-23-billion-022926296.html

As welcome as this antitrust renaissance is, it prompts an important question: why didn't we enforce antitrust law for the 40 years between Reagan and Biden?

That's what Kanter addresses the majority of his remarks to. The short answer is: crooked academic economists took bribes from monopolists and would-be monopolists to falsify their research on the impacts of monopolists, and made millions (literally – one guy made over $100m at this) testifying that monopolies were good and efficient.

After all, governments aren't just there to enforce rules – they have to make the rules first, and do to that, they need to understand how the world works, so they can understand how to fix the places where it's broken. That's where experts come in, filling regulators' dockets and juries' ears with truthful, factual testimony about their research. Experts can still be wrong, of course, but when the system works well, they're only wrong by accident.

The system doesn't work well. Back in the 1950s, the tobacco industry was threatened by the growing scientific consensus that smoking caused cancer. Industry scientists confirmed this finding. In response, the industry paid statisticians, doctors and scientists to produce deceptive research reports and testimony about the tobacco/cancer link.

The point of this work wasn't necessarily to convince people that tobacco was safe – rather, it was to create the sense that the safety of tobacco was a fundamentally unanswerable question. "Experts disagree," and you're not qualified to figure out who's right and who's wrong, so just stop trying to figure it out and light up.

In other words, Big Tobacco's cancer denial playbook wasn't so much an attack on "the truth" as it was an attack on epistemology – the system by which we figure out what is true and what isn't. The tactic was devastatingly effective. Not only did it allow the tobacco giants to kill millions of people with impunity, it allowed them to reap billions of dollars by doing so.

Since then, epistemology has been under sustained assault. By the 1970s, Big Oil knew that its products would render the Earth unfit for human habitation, and they hired the same companies that had abetted Big Tobacco's mass murder to provide cover for their own slow-motion, planetary scale killing spree.

Time and again, big business has used assaults on epistemology to provide cover for unthinkable crimes. This has given rise to today's epistemological crisis, in which we don't merely disagree about what is true, but (far more importantly) disagree about how the truth can be known:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/25/black-boxes/#when-you-know-you-know

Ask a conspiratorialist why they believe in Qanon or Hatians in Springfield eating pets, and you'll get an extremely vibes-based answer – fundamentally, they believe it because it feels true. As the old saying goes, you can't reason someone out of a belief they didn't reason their way into.

This assault on reason itself is at the core of Kanter's critique. He starts off by listing three cases in which academic economists allowed themselves to be corrupted by the monopolies they studied:

George Mason University tricked an international antitrust enforcer into attending a training seminar that they believed to be affiliated with the US government. It was actually sponsored by the very companies that enforcer was scrutnizing, and featured a parade of "experts" who asserted that these companies were great, actually.

An academic from GMU – which receives substantial tech industry funding – signed an amicus brief opposing an enforcement action against their funders. The academic also presented a defense of these funders to the OECD, all while posing as a neutral academic and not disclosing their funding sources.

An ex-GMU economist, Joshua Wright, submitted a study defending Qualcomm against the FTC, without disclosing that he'd been paid to do so. Wright has elevated undisclosed conflicts of interest to an art form:

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/law/google-lawyer-secret-weapon-joshua-wright-c98d5a31

Kanter is at pains to point out that these three examples aren't exceptional. The economics profession – whose core tenet is "incentive matter" – has made it standard practice for individual researchers and their academic institutions to take massive sums from giant corporations. Incredibly, they insist that this has nothing to do with their support of monopolies as "efficient."

Academic centers often serve as money-laundries for monopolist funders; researchers can evade disclosure requirements when they publish in journals or testify in court, saying only that they work for some esteemed university, without noting that the university is utterly dependent on money from the companies they're defending.

Now, Kanter is a lawyer, not an academic, and that means that his job is to advocate for positions, and he's at pains to say that he's got nothing but respect for ideological advocacy. What he's objecting to is partisan advocacy dressed up as impartial expertise.

For Kanter, mixing advocacy with expertise doesn't create expert advocacy – it obliterates expertise, as least when it comes to making good policy. This mixing has created a "crisis of expertise…a pervasive breakdown in the distinction between expertise and advocacy in competition policy."

The point of an independent academia, enshrined in the American Association of University Professors' charter, is to "advance knowledge by the unrestricted research and unfettered discussion of impartial investigators." We need an independent academy, because "to be of use to the legislator or the administrator, [an academic] must enjoy their complete confidence in the disinterestedness of [his or her] conclusions."

It's hard to overstate just how much money economists can make by defending monopolies. Writing for The American Prospect, Robert Kuttner gives the rate at $1,000/hour. Monopoly's top defenders make unimaginable sums, like U Chicago's Dennis Carlton, who's brought in over $100m in consulting fees:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-09-24-economists-as-apologists/

The hidden cost of all of this is epistemological consensus. As Tim Harford writes in his 2021 book The Data Detective, the truth can be known through research and peer-review:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/04/how-to-truth/#harford

But when experts deliberately seek to undermine the idea of expertise, they cast laypeople into an epistemological void. We know these questions are important, but we can't trust our corrupted expert institutions. That leaves us with urgent questions – and no answers. That's a terrifying state to be in, and it makes you easy pickings for authoritarian grifters and conspiratorial swindlers.

Seen in this light, Kanter's antitrust work is even more important. In attacking corporate power itself, he is going after the machine that funds this nihilism-inducing corruption machine.

This week, Tor Books published SPILL, a new, free LITTLE BROTHER novella about oil pipelines and indigenous landback!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/25/epistemological-chaos/#incentives-matter

Image: Ron Cogswell (modified) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:George.Mason.University.Arlington.Campus.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[uss-edsall]

A young man with slicked-back hair and restrained stubble said he had actually thought of leaving government employ only to be persuaded to stay by all the badgering. “I’ve never felt more patriotic in my life than I do right now,” he said. New resolve seemed to be setting in. Sipping drinks on the DC9 rooftop, two colleagues . . . had nothing but youthful enthusiasm for their jobs. Neither one of them knew a single colleague who was taking the buyout. Nor did they quite understand what Mr. Musk was after. “We don’t make money for shareholders,” said one . . . who had brilliant green hair, shaved temples and large hoop earrings. “We serve the public.”

[socialjusticeinamerica]

These are Muskrats DOGE Boys. They range from senior year in high school to just graduated from college. They are at USAID and the Treasury calling in all employees one at a time and giving them 15 minutes to justify keeping their job. One of them, along with his new wife and newborn child, is living in the office of a manger they had fired. It is illegal to reside in a non-residential workplace.

They range in age from 18-24. They are not government employees, nor is Elonia. Four of them work in Elon’s private companies and the other two work for German billionaire Peter Thiel. They are harassing and terrifying government employees that were hired through civil service and work under a union contract. These workers they are terrorizing are not political appointees and cannot be legally fired by the Executive branch (the White House). Furthermore the WhiteHouse and DOGE cannot legally offer buyout severance packages to workers in order for them to quit. They are paid through money authorized by Congress which has the dole power to spend money and all bills calling for the spending of money must originate in the House of Representatives. The Presidency and DOGE do not have money to pay for buyouts even if they were legally allowed to offer them, which they are not.

Elon is staging a hostile takeover of government and using the most despicable tactics of Gilded Age “robber barons.” It’s highly likely that federal employees that accept these buyout offers will not only lose their jobs but not see any of the money Trump and Musk are promising them. This is the plan Steve Bannon tried to implement in 2016 before he was fired for upstaging Trump. He called it “Deconstructing the Administrative State.” The majority of the government will be eliminated and all the laws and regulations that constrain corporations and billionaire oligarchs will be gone. The Republican oligarchs will reduce us to a third world state where we fight for scraps and have zero voice. Basically all that will remain is a corrupted military, law enforcement, and courts that are all loyal to the chief executive.

You will have a trifecta of fascism, oligarchy, and kleptocracy at the same time. We will be living and dying in favelas. Favelas are the Brazilian shanty towns alongside the landfills on the edge of the cities. If you’re not familiar with them you should google them. The wealthy live in gated mansion communities with private security. Meanwhile the obedient wage slaves work at the whims of their supervisors and live in rundown tenements in the slums that are overrun with crime and pollution. Everyone else lives in favelas in homemade shacks made of discarded corrugated metal, cardboard, and bits of broken lumber. Raw sewage flows in the streets and there is no electricity. Drug lords and other criminals rule and terrorize the downtrodden who are often malnourished, strung out on drugs, and disease ridden. Crime, violence, and brutality goes unchecked. Food is scavenged from the landfill, is begged for in the streets, is stolen, or distributed by crime lords to those who work for them in illicit activities.

Get ready for Make America Brazil. No offense to the people there and I have friends snd family from there and still living there. Brazil has sadly become the poster child for autocrats and oligarchs run amok. Trump and Musk are taking us right down that path and it won’t take that many years for it to happen. The Great Depression wiped out nearly the whole country in under a year and it lasted over a decade. Of course we could erupt into civil war and sectarian violence like Northern Ireland, the Balkans, Lebanon, Syria, Afghanistan, or a whole slew of other countries. It happens to white Europeans just the same as with third world non-white people. Take your pick, the Brazilian model, a severe depression, or endless civil war in every town.

I’ve been on this site for about a decade and a half and have called everything right so far. Go on YouTube and see the interviews and documentaries with experts on how fascism, oligarchy, kleptocracy, and civil war ruin democracies. Read the non-fiction books on the subject if you have time. Either the dictator is driven out of power fairly quickly or the country dies. Even if Trump/Musk go the way of Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania or Benito Mussolini in Italy there’s still likely to be destabilizing violence from their deranged supporters for an indeterminate amount of time.