Federal Workers Jump at Buyout Offers They Once Shunned
Federal workers who scoffed when they first received Elon Musk's infamous 'Fork in the Road' buyout initiative are taking different tack now that there is a second offer on the table: saying yes.
Staffers at several agencies — among them the Departments of Defense, Energy and Transportation — face deadlines this month to resign now and continue receiving pay through September.
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Boston Globe
an hour ago
- Boston Globe
Pride Parade to kick off in Boston along with ‘No Kings' protests nationwide
This year's Pride arrives at a time of In the early days of his second term, President Trump signed an executive order In April, the Advertisement Pro-democracy activist groups Mass 50501 and Indivisible Mass Coalition are among the sponsors of this year's Boston Pride which coincides with the city's 'No Kings' protest against the Trump administration. The 'No Kings' protests Saturday are planned in cities across the country. A flagship 'No Kings' march and rally are planned in Philadelphia, but no events are scheduled to take place in Washington, D.C., where a military parade will take place Saturday evening on what is also Trump's 79th birthday. Advertisement The 'No Kings Day of Defiance' has been organized to reject authoritarianism, billionaire-first politics and the militarization of the country's democracy, according to a press release from No Kings. Protests earlier this year have denounced Trump and billionaire Elon Musk, the now-former leader of Trump's Department of Government Efficiency, a government organization designed to slash federal spending. Protesters have called for Trump to be 'dethroned' as they compare his actions to that of a king and not a democratically elected president. After some rain showers Saturday morning, attendees at the Pride parade and festival and 'No Kings' demonstrations should have Material from the Associated Press was used in this report. This is a developing story. Nick Stoico can be reached at
Axios
3 hours ago
- Axios
Eight chaotic days shake Trump's grip on the presidency
President Trump began the week of his 79th birthday reeling from his explosive public breakup with Elon Musk. He ended it with tanks in the capital, Marines in Los Angeles, a Democrati c senator dragged away in handcuffs, thousands of protests planned nationwide, and a new war in the Middle East. Why it matters: In a year already brimming with "holy sh*t" moments, the past eight days have brought unprecedented new intensity, stakes and challenges to Trump's presidency. Zoom in: America is on edge. Trump became the first president since the Civil Rights Era to federalize the National Guard without a governor's consent — sending troops to L.A. to quash protests sparked by his administration's immigration raids. Democrats, led by California Gov. Gavin Newsom, have accused Trump of blatantly defying the Constitution and pouring gasoline on the fire by deploying 700 Marines on domestic soil. When Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) tried to confront Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem at a press conference Thursday, he was forcibly removed and handcuffed. Between the lines: Trump officials want this fight, eager to flex executive power and frame Democrats as defenders of undocumented immigrants and violent agitators. But the backlash is threatening to spiral beyond the White House's control. Millions of people are expected to join "No Kings" protests in nearly 1,800 cities on Saturday — the largest single-day demonstrations against Trump since his return to power. Expect an extraordinary split-screen as Trump celebrates not only his birthday, but a massive military parade in Washington that he's dreamed of since his first term. "For those people that want to protest, they're going to be met with very big force," Trump warned this week, dismissing the demonstrators as "people that hate our country." Zoom out: With unrest boiling over at home, Israel's unprecedented attack on Iran suddenly threatened to unravel Trump's crowning foreign policy achievement from his first term: "No new wars." Trump had publicly urged Israel not to strike Iran while he actively pursued a nuclear deal with the Iranians, and even assured allies that the U.S. would not participate in the operation. Israel did it anyway — bombing nuclear sites, assassinating top generals and scientists, and sabotaging missile facilities in one of the most sophisticated covert strikes in the history of the Middle East. The intrigue: Trump now claims that the wildly successful operation — which he told Axios used "great American equipment" — could make it easier to reach a nuclear deal with Iran. But his MAGA base is deeply uneasy. Iran has launched retaliatory missile attacks against Israel, which U.S. forces helped the intercept. Oil prices have surged, and the threat of Iran targeting U.S. assets in the region remains very real. Opposition to the "forever wars" in Iraq and Afghanistan helped fuel Trump's political rise — and many of his most loyal supporters view any new Middle East entanglement as a betrayal of that legacy. "[D]rop Israel. Let them fight their own wars," MAGA isolationist Tucker Carlson wrote in a post accusing the U.S. of complicity in the attack. "What happens next will define Donald Trump's presidency." The bottom line: The pace of news in the Trump era, both at home and abroad, makes it exceedingly difficult to distinguish the chaotic from the consequential.
Vox
3 hours ago
- Vox
What happens to DOGE without Elon Musk?
Elon Musk holds a news conference with President Donald Trump to mark the end of his tenure as a special government employee overseeing DOGE on May 30 in the Oval Office of the White House. Tom Brenner for Washington Post via Getty Images Elon Musk may be gone from the Trump administration — and his friendship status with President Donald Trump may be at best uncertain — but his whirlwind stint in government certainly left its imprint. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), his pet government-slashing project, remains entrenched in Washington. During his 130-day tenure, Musk led DOGE in eliminating about 260,000 federal employee jobs and gutting agencies supporting scientific research and humanitarian aid. But to date, DOGE claims to have saved the government $180 billion — well short of its ambitious (and frankly never realistic) target of cutting at least $2 trillion from the federal budget. And with Musk's departure still fresh, there are reports that the federal government is trying to rehire federal workers who quit or were let go. For Elaine Kamarck, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, DOGE's tactics will likely end up being disastrous in the long run. 'DOGE came in with these huge cuts, which were not attached to a plan,' she told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram. Kamarck knows all about making government more efficient. In the 1990s, she ran the Clinton administration's Reinventing Government program. 'I was Elon Musk,' she told Today, Explained. With the benefit of that experience, she assesses Musk's record at DOGE, and what, if anything, the billionaire's loud efforts at cutting government spending added up to. Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There's much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify. What do you think Elon Musk's legacy is? Well, he will not have totally, radically reshaped the federal government. Absolutely not. In fact, there's a high probability that on January 20, 2029, when the next president takes over, the federal government is about the same size as it is now, and is probably doing the same stuff that it's doing now. What he did manage to do was insert chaos, fear, and loathing into the federal workforce. There was reporting in the Washington Post late last week that these cuts were so ineffective that the White House is actually reaching out to various federal employees who were laid off and asking them to come back, from the FDA to the IRS to even USAID. Which cuts are sticking at this point and which ones aren't? First of all, in a lot of cases, people went to court and the courts have reversed those earlier decisions. So the first thing that happened is, courts said, 'No, no, no, you can't do it this way. You have to bring them back.' The second thing that happened is that Cabinet officers started to get confirmed by the Senate. And remember that a lot of the most spectacular DOGE stuff was happening in February. In February, these Cabinet secretaries were preparing for their Senate hearings. They weren't on the job. Now that their Cabinet secretary's home, what's happening is they're looking at these cuts and they're saying, 'No, no, no! We can't live with these cuts because we have a mission to do.' As the government tries to hire back the people they fired, they're going to have a tough time, and they're going to have a tough time for two reasons. First of all, they treated them like dirt, and they've said a lot of insulting things. Second, most of the people who work for the federal government are highly skilled. They're not paper pushers. We have computers to push our paper, right? They're scientists. They're engineers. They're people with high skills, and guess what? They can get jobs outside the government. So there's going to be real lasting damage to the government from the way they did this. And it's analogous to the lasting damage that they're causing at universities, where we now have top scientists who used to invent great cures for cancer and things like that, deciding to go find jobs in Europe because this culture has gotten so bad. What happens to this agency now? Who's in charge of it? Well, what they've done is DOGE employees have been embedded in each of the organizations in the government, okay? And they basically — and the president himself has said this — they basically report to the Cabinet secretaries. So if you are in the Transportation Department, you have to make sure that Sean Duffy, who's the secretary of transportation, agrees with you on what you want to do. And Sean Duffy has already had a fight during a Cabinet meeting with Elon Musk. You know that he has not been thrilled with the advice he's gotten from DOGE. So from now on, DOGE is going to have to work hand in hand with Donald Trump's appointed leaders. And just to bring this around to what we're here talking about now, they're in this huge fight over wasteful spending with the so-called big, beautiful bill. Does this just look like the government as usual, ultimately? It's actually worse than normal. Because the deficit impacts are bigger than normal. It's adding more to the deficit than previous bills have done. And the second reason it's worse than normal is that everybody is still living in a fantasy world. And the fantasy world says that somehow we can deal with our deficits by cutting waste, fraud, and abuse. That is pure nonsense. Let me say it: pure nonsense. Where does most of the government money go? Does it go to some bureaucrats sitting on Pennsylvania Avenue? It goes to us. It goes to your grandmother and her Social Security and her Medicare. It goes to veterans in veterans benefits. It goes to Americans. That's why it's so hard to cut it. It's so hard to cut it because it's us.
