Where are you getting that? Ive never seen a classified cafeteria menu. Part of your classification training specifically warns about overclassificstion. It got hammered into us quite a bit that it's just as bad as underclassification. Aside from the administrative issues it causes, people have actually been killed because information was classified above the level that the people who needed it could get at.
Edit: and although there's a process for declassification, it's long and complicated by design, because classified information is supposed to be handled with care. This is probably also part of the reason people are freaking a out about Musk and USAID classified info--there are normally extremely severe penalties to anyone who hands classified information to someone who doensn't both 1) have the right clearance and 2) a need to know. The idea that this process is being circumvented so easily when normally in situations of much greater consequence the rules normally hold fast is troubling.
I've been reading here since the SSC days but only posted a short message once before. I wanted to weigh in on some of the stuff discussed in this thread, though.
I'm currently a federal employee for the second time, and evem though I'm at the top of the GS scale with the DC cost of living adjustmeny, I still toom roughly a 100k pay cut to come to my current job. Largely, it was because of stress and hours worked, and because my wife, who works here, liked it so much, although with the commute (I had to come in 5 days a week prior to the EO but worked from home in my private industry job), it ends up being a long day anyway. The first time I was a federal employee, I was a theoretical physicist at a DoD lab--unlike DoE national labs, where the employees are contractors, DoD lab employees are federal employees--but I made a lot less money than I do now.
First of all, I wanted to mention that only one person I know where I work has received this buyout email. I didn’t. If I had, and I thought it was legitimate, I might take it, because I wouldn't have trouble getting another job. I somehow still end up getting emails from recruiters despite having deactivated my LinkedIn account. I have literally no reason to be here if they’re going to try to turn it into a bad work environment.
Second of all, with respect to DEI--the office that our agency had previously labeled DEI mainly handled EEO complaints and reasonable accommodations. DEI was almost like an afterthought and essentially only ge erated various legally mandated demographic reporting requirements and planned the occasional heritage celebration event, whoch was always optional. Both EEO and reasonable accommodations are still mandated by law, so they can't get rid of those--so now we just have an EEO office which is mostly the same as it was before, except maybe now they don't have to generate as many reports (although that's not even clear). They've also done some silly things like remove letters from various acronyms if they could be construed as relating to DEI, so the acronyms don't actually spell words anymore.
The general sense I get when I talk to people at other agencies about the "buyout" is that there's a lack of belief in it's legitimacy. If you reply "resign" to an email, is there any gaurantee that they have to pay you for the full 8 months? Can they fire you or lay you off in that time? Can they require you to come into work?
Finally, anybody who works with money in the federal government knows all kinds of ways that government agencies could save money. Not rewarding people for spending their entire budget and penalizing them for having money left over for example. However, the executive branch is powerless to change most of this. Laws, congressional oversight, and demands for transparency and congressional control force things to get done in a particular way. Frankly, whatever small amount of money gets saved by trying to get workers to resign and through other reductions in force (which i expect won't be as significant as some people here think. The hiring freeze, for example, doensn't even apply to the DoD) will be a drop in the bucket compared to what could be done if things were done in a smarter way. Is DOGE going to somehow make it possible to do those things? I'll believe it when I see it.
Edit: I almost forgot, regarding the J1 J2 thing. Maybe that's illegal if you're doing them in the same hours, but my agency explicitly allows you to have outside employment if you get it approved and if it doesn't interfere with your work schedule. During my old non-government job, I was working weekends for a startup, and I considered trying to get it approved so I could continue here, but ultimately, I didn't want to spend the extra time working.
Normally? This is at best a Chinese robber fallacy and at worst a series of cherry picked, misrepresented, and false claims. That is absolutely not the way it "normally" works for federal government employees (not that I don't understand what you're referencing).
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