Latest departures in Trump administration’s deferred resignation program come as Congress faces government shutdown deadline – key US politics stories from Sunday 28 September
More than 100,000 federal workers are to formally resign on Tuesday, the largest such mass event in US history, as part of a Trump administration program designed to make sweeping cuts to the federal workforce.
With Congress facing a deadline of Tuesday to authorize more funding or spark a government shutdown, the White House has also ordered federal agencies to draw up plans for large-scale firings of workers if the partisan fight fails to yield a deal.
Workers preparing to leave the government have described how months of “fear and intimidation” left them feeling like they had no choice but to depart.
“Federal workers stay for the mission. When that mission is taken away, when they’re scapegoated, when their job security is uncertain, and when their tiny semblance of work-life balance is stripped away, they leave,” a longtime employee at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) told the Guardian. “That’s why I left.”
Here are the key stories at a glance.
US set for largest mass resignation in history as Trump continues deep cuts
Federal workers say they have little choice but to depart, with 100,000 leaving under deferred resignation program
The Trump administration is set to oversee the largest mass resignation in US history on Tuesday, with more than 100,000 federal workers set to formally quit as part of the latest wave of its deferred resignation program.
With Congress facing a deadline of Tuesday to authorize more funding or spark a government shutdown, the White House has also ordered federal agencies to draw up plans for large-scale firings of workers if the partisan fight fails to yield a deal.
Workers preparing to leave government as part of the resignation program – one of several pillars of Donald Trump’s sweeping cuts to the federal workforce – have described how months of “fear and intimidation” left them feeling like they had no choice but to depart.
“Federal workers stay for the mission. When that mission is taken away, when they’re scapegoated, when their job security is uncertain, and when their tiny semblance of work-life balance is stripped away, they leave,” a longtime employee at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) told the Guardian. “That’s why I left.”
The total resignation program is set to cost $14.8bn, with 200,000 workers paid their full salary and benefits while on administrative leave for up to eight months, according to a Senate Democrats’ report in July.
Trump officials argue this outlay is worth it. The Office of Personnel Management claimed the one-time costs lower longer-term spending by the federal government. It also criticized job protections of federal civil servants, claiming the government should have a “modern, at-will employment framework like most employers”.
A spokesperson for the White House claimed there was “no additional cost to the government” as employees would have received their salaries regardless of the program. “In fact, this is the largest and most effective workforce reduction plan in history and will save the government $28bn annually,” they added.
The total number of expected departures through the delayed resignation and voluntary separation programs, attrition, and early retirement programs is about 275,000 employees, the spokesman said.
Several thousands of additional federal workers have been fired as part of reduction in force mandates ordered by the administration. The mass exodus is the largest single-year decline in civilian federal employment since the second world war.
Federal employees who took the deferred resignation offer requested to speak anonymously in hopes of returning to the federal government in the future and to protect future job prospects.
They are entering a lagging job market as the unemployment rate in August 2025 ticked up to 4.3%, the highest since 2021, and only 22,000 jobs were added amid disruptions and uncertainty caused by Trump’s tariffs.
“It’s a huge grieving process,” said a Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) employee who took the deferred resignation offer. “Myself and many others that I know really hoped that we would finish our careers with the government. We felt very tied, especially in the VA, to the mission.
“Many of us thought we could do better for our clients, for our veterans outside of the VA, and a lot of us were so burnt out from the six months before the deferred resignation that it was actually a mental health decision for many as well.”
Communicating why they left has been challenging while searching for a new job, the VA employee said. “The job market stinks right now,” they said. “It’s great to not be working 60 to 70 hours a week any more, but you also lose your support system from those that stayed, and from those that may judge you for leaving.”
An archaeologist at the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), and military veteran, said they “loved” their job, but took the deferred resignation out of fear and pressure from the administration. “I was forced to accept the resignation plan. “Not physically, or through any legal means, but through fear and intimidation,” they said.
They cited comments from Russell Vought, Trump’s head of the Office of Management and Budget, who said of federal workers last October: “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down … We want to put them in trauma.”
“This is exactly what happened,” the USDA worker said. “I was scared to go to work. Scared that the next day would be the day I would get fired, or barred from future service, scared I would wait too long to leave and not find a job, and just living everyday like a raw nerve.”
The public vilification of federal workers has pushed many to take the resignation program, the archaeologist suggested, as they were constantly inundated with threats of cuts and firings.
Another employee at the US Department of Agriculture was fired in February as a probationary employee, reinstated in April only to take the deferred resignation offer.
“At that point, I felt they could terminate me at any time,” they told the Guardian. “It’s hard to focus on your work when they can just send you an email and you can be gone, and they completely changed the terms of my work. I was hoping things would stabilize and there would be an opportunity to go back, but now it doesn’t look like there will be an opportunity.”
The American Federation of Government Employees and other labor unions representing federal workers filed a lawsuit that is still ongoing over the deferred resignation program earlier this year, alleging the buyout circumvents congressional authority, undermines statutorily required functions of government agencies in losing employees en masse, and was enacted with the threat of firings.
“Purging the federal government of dedicated career federal employees will have vast, unintended consequences that will cause chaos for the Americans who depend on a functioning federal government,” said AFGE president Everett Kelley in February. “This offer should not be viewed as voluntary.
“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 want to.”
US added just 22,000 jobs in August, continuing slowdown amid Trump tariffs
Latest report also contained more bad news – the US lost 13,000 jobs in June, according to latest survey
Trump is flaunting his corruption. Is it changing what the US thinks of scandal?
President has shouted from rooftops what his predecessors would have tried to cover up for fear of ending their careers
“This is a dangerous notion that, just because a president chooses to be corrupt in public openly, it’s OK,” said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. “People say, well, if it were really corrupt, it would be hidden. It’s a false assumption, but many people have it. It’s a new theory of scandal.”
Trump delivered one of his most blatant examples last weekend. In a social media post addressed directly to Pam Bondi, the attorney general, the president fumed over the lack of legal action against James Comey, the former FBI director, Adam Schiff, the California senator, and Letitia James, the New York attorney general.
“We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility. They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW,” he wrote, before deleting the message and posting another supportive of Bondi.
It was a glaringly obvious effort to order the justice department to take action against his political opponents. On Thursday the agency followed through by charging Comey with false statements and obstruction over congressional testimony about the investigation into contacts between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia.
Democrats described it as “a disgraceful attack on the rule of law”, the latest in a series of moves that have threatened the justice department’s traditional independence. But Republicans, who five decades ago forced Nixon to resign over the Watergate burglary and ensuing cover-up, were mostly silent. There was no hint of impeaching Trump over what many saw as an impeachable offence.
Richard Painter, a former chief White House ethics lawyer, said: “It’s what prosecutors do in dictatorships. They want to run up this Comey thing that has no merit to it. That’s what they do in Russia. You piss off Putin and end up in some gulag somewhere. That’s not, I thought, how we want to run our country.”
If Trump’s shamelessness is one superpower, his ability to flood the zone is another. He has spent the past decade proving the thesis that while one crisis can topple a politician, a hundred crises are subject to the law of diminishing returns. “It’s Watergate, Every Day,” read a headline on the Bulwark website this week.
In a 2005 conversation captured on an Access Hollywood tape released in 2016, he described his approach to women: “I just start kissing them … And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything … Grab ‘em by the pussy.”
He has urged foreign governments to investigate political opponents. During a 2016 campaign rally, Trump said, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” referring to rival Hillary Clinton’s deleted emails. In 2019 he publicly called on China to target Joe Biden, saying: “China should start an investigation into the Bidens.”
In a 2017 NBC News interview, Trump openly stated that he fired Comey because of “this Russia thing”, referring to an investigation into Russian election interference. This admission was cited in special counsel Robert Mueller’s report as potential evidence of obstruction of justice, yet Trump framed it as a decisive action rather than wrongdoing.
Trump expressed no contrition over the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 but rather persisted with his false claim of a stolen election, hailed the rioters as patriots and issued a blanket pardon of them on his first day back in office.
In May this year, the president said he will accept a $400m luxury plane from Qatar and use it as Air Force One, defending the arrangement as a “gesture of good faith” despite concerns that it could violate the US constitution’s emoluments clause. The Trump Organization, run by the president’s two oldest sons, struck a series of lucrative deals in the Middle East.
The breaches have come so thick and fast that they have become unremarkable to a numbed, desensitised audience. Sabato commented: “It becomes background noise. If there’s bad news about a particular person or category of public policy then it’s less significant because you expect it. What’s Trump done today? Then you shrug your shoulders and have your third cup of coffee.”
Kurt Bardella, a political commentator, agrees that “Trump being Trump” no longer has shock value, especially since he previewed many of his actions during the election campaign. “It’s normalised versus when someone acts completely out of character: ‘Whoa, where did that come from? I never would have expected that person to act this way.’”
The lightning-paced news cycle makes it easy for Trump to move on from the scandal du jour, Bardella adds. “Watergate was so powerful, [Monica] Lewinsky was so powerful because it was a singular focus for an extended period of time. Now we consider a long news cycle something that lasts actually an entire week, whereas before a week was a blip on the radar.”
Even so, Trump has faced a barrage of lawsuits, ethical complaints and demands for investigations. But Republicans control both chambers of Congress and have shown little appetite for imposing accountability. He has spent a decade purging critics from the party and reshaping it in his own image.
Wendy Schiller, a political science professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, said: “The institutional structures that should be countervailing, that should be pushing up against this and saying: ‘Oh, this is terrible, he’s breaking the law’, are completely absent. They’ve been co-opted or taken over by the Republican party or the conservative supreme court.
“There isn’t a counter voice to say to the American people this is not acceptable behaviour. I don’t think Trump gets credit for flooding the zone or that his strategy is particularly remarkable. It’s that he has neutered the Congress and bought off the supreme court. There isn’t anybody, literally, who can stop him.”
Trump’s boasting about conduct that others would hide also strikes a particular chord with his Make America great again (Maga) support base. In an October 2016 presidential debate, when Hillary Clinton accused him of avoiding taxes for years, Trump responded defiantly: “That makes me smart.”
In a subsequent episode of Saturday Night Live, the comedian Dave Chappelle argued that such moments humanised Trump: his blunt admission of gaming a rigged system made him relatable, not elitist. Chappelle said: “The reason he’s loved is because people in Ohio have never seen somebody like him. He’s what I call an honest liar.”
Years later, that still holds with the Maga faithful. John Zogby, an author and pollster, observed: “For voters who want to rage against the machine, instead of being elected president and head of the machine, he’s the guy who feels he’s been put in place to both enforce and live the rage against the machine.
“The very fact that he breaks all the rules so brazenly – takes foreign trips and makes personal business deals – adds to the appeal. He’s the baddest cowboy in town. He does and says what a lot of people wish that they could do and say and he gets away with it. With Donald Trump, the one piece of authenticity is he is exactly what he says he is.”
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