President Donald Trump offered government employees an opportunity to resign and receive 8 months … [+] compensation, but the offer was met with confusion at the Federal Bureau of Prisons
The BOP’s challenges have only intensified since President Donald Trump’s inauguration, which coincided with the resignation of Director Colette Peters. In the absence of permanent leadership, Acting Director William Lathrop has issued a flurry of directives to address sweeping policy shifts, including a mandatory return to in-office work, a hiring freeze, and the identification of probationary employees and those on administrative leave. These measures have left many BOP staff grappling with uncertainty.
The deferred resignation offer has added to this turmoil. Employees were instructed to simply type “Resign” in reply to the email if they wished to accept the offer, with little additional guidance or answers to their questions. The deadline for employees to respond is February 6, but the vague communication and lack of clarity surrounding retirement benefits or other long-term implications have caused widespread confusion.
The Trump administration sent out a memorandum to all federal workers offering them the opportunity to take a “deferred resignation,” that would allow them to collect a severance until September 2025. The offer, with the subject line “Fork in the Road,” from the Office of Personnel Management, said federal employees can agree to leave their jobs and receive about eight months of salary.
The memorandum bore similarities to one sent out by Elon Musk shortly after his purchase of Twitter, now X. In 2022, Musk sent a similar email to Twitter employees asking them to commit to a hard work schedule or leave. The subject line of that memo was the same “fork in the road.” Musk heads the nongovernmental group known as the Department of Government Efficiency, meant to trim trillions dollars from the national deficit.
The initial days of the Trump administration have meant big changes at the BOP. A hiring freeze, a mandatory return to in-office work, identification of those BOP employees on a probationary period or administrative leave and now an offer to resign have all led to a crisis inside of the BOP. This comes at a time when the BOP just saw its Director, Colette Peters, resign on the first day of Trump’s presidency. According to a BOP insider who did not want to be identified there are nonstop meetings trying to address the sweeping changes.
The deferred resignation was made available to all full-time federal employees except for military personnel of the armed forces, employees of the U.S. Postal Service, those in positions related to immigration enforcement and national security. While the BOP was not specifically named in the email sent to all government employees, it was listed on another memorandum from Homeland Security that gave “Any law enforcement official in the Federal Bureau of Prisons… ” to perform investigation to determine the location and identification of any illegal immigrant, the same function performed by an immigration officer.
“When I first received the email,” one BOP employee told me and who wished not be identified, “It thought it was a on-line phishing scheme until I started getting texts from my co-workers who got the same message.” The BOP employee also told me that such an offer usually comes with some way to reach out with questions or presents frequently asked questions beyond the offer. ”We sort of got what we got and we all have questions,” the BOP employee said.