Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes in April 2024. Photo by Jerod MacDonald-Evoy | Arizona Mirror
A dozen attorneys general, including Arizona’s Kris Mayes, are warning federal employees across the country to be wary of the White House’s so-called buyout offer.
According to a December 2024 congressional report, as many as 34,150 Arizonans are employed by the federal government to help oversee the disbursement of services from several federal programs at the state level, including Veterans Affairs, Medicaid, Medicare and the Social Security Administration.
Last month, more than 2 million federal employees received an email from the Office of Personnel Management urging them to take part in a “deferred resignation program” by Feb. 6 and receive pay through the end of September or risk losing their jobs anyway as part of the Trump administration’s purge of the federal civil service.
Military personnel, U.S. Postal Service workers, and employees in positions related to immigration enforcement and national security were excluded from the offer, which represents the first step in President Donald Trump’s vow to replace career civil servants with loyalists who will carry out his administration’s orders.
The emails sparked alarm among federal employee unions and politicians, who warned that the offer may not be legitimate, since only Congress has the ability to craft a federal budget, and no plan currently exists to fund the buyouts.
Everett Kelley, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees, the nation’s largest federal employees union, slammed the buyout as yet another intimidation tactic from the current administration.
“This offer should not be viewed as voluntary,” he said. “Between the flurry of anti-worker executive orders and policies, it is clear that the Trump administration’s goal is to turn the federal government into a toxic environment where workers cannot stay even if they wanted to.”
Mayes joined eleven other Democratic attorneys general from California, Connecticut, New York, Hawaii, New Jersey, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Vermont and Washington to advise recipients of the buyout emails to be cautious. In a written statement, Mayes recommended that federal employees defer to their unions, and said that slashing the federal workforce only serves to hurt Arizonans.
“Federal employees in Arizona need to understand the buyout offer from the Trump administration is completely unreliable and may be unenforceable,” she said. “My office will do everything in our power to protect Arizona workers and we urge you to follow your union’s guidance. This so-called buyout is yet another attack that will cripple the critical federal services Arizonans rely on.”
More than 2 million Arizonans are enrolled in Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program, a federally funded health care program for children of low-income families that is administered by Medicaid. Critics of the buyout offer fear that paring down the size of the federal civilian workforce will worsen the ability of everyday Americans to access federal assistance programs.
A similar effort during the 1990s to shrink the size of the federal government by offering federal employees buyouts resulted in agency backlogs and a loss of expertise. Some agencies ended up hiring outside consultants — in many cases the very same employees who had resigned — at higher taxpayer costs.
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