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A potential huge purge from the federal payrolls appears to have Elon Musk’s fingerprints all over it.Credit…Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times

The “Fork in the Road” subject line sent from an email on Tuesday to millions of federal employees may have been puzzling at first. The message from the Office of Personnel Management was essentially a pink-slip notice: It offered a choice of returning to the office full-time, accepting a buyout offer or risk being furloughed or, eventually, fired. (It shared a subject line with an email that Elon Musk used to force widespread resignations at Twitter in 2022.)

There’s tons of confusion about how the buyout package, which offers employees eight months of pay, will work. We have a full rundown below of what’s quickly becoming a consequential workplace story — but what do you think about the “dignity” of buyout packages. How many months of pay is fair?

President Trump has long railed about Washington bureaucracy, campaigning to “dismantle the deep state.” That became a central plank of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-led conservative policy paper that has become a blueprint for a second Trump term — and was a major priority for Elon Musk, one of Trump’s top allies.

Now the Trump administration is offering payouts to millions of federal employees to resign, seemingly amid a “flood the zone” strategy of disrupting the government status quo. And there are signs that Musk, now Trump’s cost-cutter in chief, has had a big hand in how this is playing out.

The TL;DR: The Office of Personnel Management, which oversees the federal civilian work force, on Tuesday emailed government workers with an offer. Respond with “resign” by Feb. 6, and get full pay through the end of September. Or, risk being furloughed or being made easier to fire.

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