At the National Institutes of Health, six directors — from institutes focused on infectious disease, child health, nursing research and the human genome — are leaving or being forced out.
At the Federal Aviation Administration, nearly a dozen top leaders, including the chief air traffic officer, are retiring early.
And at the Treasury Department, more than 200 experienced managers and highly skilled technical experts who help run the government’s financial systems chose to accept the Trump administration’s resignation offer earlier this year, according to a staffer and documents obtained by The Washington Post.
Across the federal government, a push for early retirement and voluntary separation is fueling a voluntary exodus of experienced, knowledgeable staffers unlike anything in living memory, according to interviews with 18 employees across 10 agencies and records reviewed by The Post. Other leaders with decades of service are being dismissed as the administration eliminates full offices or divisions at a time.
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The first resignation offer, sent in January, saw 75,000 workers across government agree to quit and keep drawing pay through September, the administration has said. But a second round, rolling out agency by agency through the spring, is seeing a sustained, swelling uptick that will dwarf the first, potentially climbing into the hundreds of thousands, the employees and the records show.
Follow Trump’s second term
The Post could not determine the exact number of second-round resignations, which is tightly held within each agency. But the employees and the records suggest that disproportionately older, more senior and experienced employees are heading for the exit — in part because they fear being fired or having their positions reclassified as political, at-will jobs under a new Trump program, federal workers said in interviews. Others are leaving simply because they are tired of the chaos, mismanagement and poor treatment they say they have faced under the new administration.
Jeffrey Grant, a senior official at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, left federal service after 42 years in February because he saw the “writing on the wall,” he said in an interview, as he watched the new administration prepare to fire civil servants. Now, he is noticing many talented colleagues follow in his footsteps, he said, including senior CMS staffers who ran core components of the agency’s strategy and operations. CMS administers more than $1 trillion a year in health insurance, covering over 130 million Americans.
“We’re losing some really smart people and really senior people,” Grant said. “Those will be the people that can easily get jobs outside the government … they will disappear, and they may never come back. Maybe they’ll come back under a different administration, but it’s a huge loss for the government.”
The scores of departures will have immediate consequences, government employees said, slowing or halting work such as the Food and Drug Administration’s issuance of food safety warnings and the Treasury Department’s disbursement of payments. Other effects will be felt over coming months and years, employees predicted, as agencies lose people representing decades of institutional knowledge — imperiling the quality of work done and services provided.
Asked for comment, a White House spokesperson referred questions to the Office of Personnel Management. OPM did not respond to emails.
Proponents of downsizing the government say it’s a long overdue chance to thin the ranks of aging, ossified senior management. Some have argued for years that the government is due for a spike in retirements, as waves of baby boomers age out and leave. Avik Roy, a former adviser to leading GOP policymakers and chairman of the right-leaning Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, said he sees both sides of the argument.
Losing people with highly specific knowledge about how agencies work could make government more inefficient, Roy said, counter to the stated goal of billionaire Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service, or Department of Government Efficiency, which has been spearheading efforts to reduce spending and staff. The federal government is more complex than Twitter, where Musk slashed staff after buying the company in 2022, Roy said: Federal employees with years of specialized experience may not be as easily replaced as software engineers.
At the same time, he said, the departures could lead to much-needed reforms.
“I’m sure there are some cobwebs being cleared out,” Roy said. “People who are, let’s say, status-quo-biased.”
At the Federal Aviation Administration, nearly a dozen top leaders, including the chief air traffic officer, are retiring early.
And at the Treasury Department, more than 200 experienced managers and highly skilled technical experts who help run the government’s financial systems chose to accept the Trump administration’s resignation offer earlier this year, according to a staffer and documents obtained by The Washington Post.
Across the federal government, a push for early retirement and voluntary separation is fueling a voluntary exodus of experienced, knowledgeable staffers unlike anything in living memory, according to interviews with 18 employees across 10 agencies and records reviewed by The Post. Other leaders with decades of service are being dismissed as the administration eliminates full offices or divisions at a time.
ADVERTISING
The first resignation offer, sent in January, saw 75,000 workers across government agree to quit and keep drawing pay through September, the administration has said. But a second round, rolling out agency by agency through the spring, is seeing a sustained, swelling uptick that will dwarf the first, potentially climbing into the hundreds of thousands, the employees and the records show.
Follow Trump’s second term
The Post could not determine the exact number of second-round resignations, which is tightly held within each agency. But the employees and the records suggest that disproportionately older, more senior and experienced employees are heading for the exit — in part because they fear being fired or having their positions reclassified as political, at-will jobs under a new Trump program, federal workers said in interviews. Others are leaving simply because they are tired of the chaos, mismanagement and poor treatment they say they have faced under the new administration.
Jeffrey Grant, a senior official at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, left federal service after 42 years in February because he saw the “writing on the wall,” he said in an interview, as he watched the new administration prepare to fire civil servants. Now, he is noticing many talented colleagues follow in his footsteps, he said, including senior CMS staffers who ran core components of the agency’s strategy and operations. CMS administers more than $1 trillion a year in health insurance, covering over 130 million Americans.
“We’re losing some really smart people and really senior people,” Grant said. “Those will be the people that can easily get jobs outside the government … they will disappear, and they may never come back. Maybe they’ll come back under a different administration, but it’s a huge loss for the government.”
The scores of departures will have immediate consequences, government employees said, slowing or halting work such as the Food and Drug Administration’s issuance of food safety warnings and the Treasury Department’s disbursement of payments. Other effects will be felt over coming months and years, employees predicted, as agencies lose people representing decades of institutional knowledge — imperiling the quality of work done and services provided.
Asked for comment, a White House spokesperson referred questions to the Office of Personnel Management. OPM did not respond to emails.
Proponents of downsizing the government say it’s a long overdue chance to thin the ranks of aging, ossified senior management. Some have argued for years that the government is due for a spike in retirements, as waves of baby boomers age out and leave. Avik Roy, a former adviser to leading GOP policymakers and chairman of the right-leaning Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, said he sees both sides of the argument.
Losing people with highly specific knowledge about how agencies work could make government more inefficient, Roy said, counter to the stated goal of billionaire Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service, or Department of Government Efficiency, which has been spearheading efforts to reduce spending and staff. The federal government is more complex than Twitter, where Musk slashed staff after buying the company in 2022, Roy said: Federal employees with years of specialized experience may not be as easily replaced as software engineers.
At the same time, he said, the departures could lead to much-needed reforms.
“I’m sure there are some cobwebs being cleared out,” Roy said. “People who are, let’s say, status-quo-biased.”
