The Department of Transportation is in chaos after thousands of workers took up a resignation deal — and now the agency is begging some of them to stay.
Under orders tied to Donald Trump and a federal workforce-cutting plan reportedly backed by Elon Musk’s DOGE, the DOT offered a second round of buyouts. About 4,700 employees jumped at the chance to leave, Politico reported. That’s nearly 1 in 10 workers.
Now, the department is scrambling to reverse the damage.
“It’s a s*** show, honestly,” one DOT employee told Politico. “I feel for HR because this is a mess they didn’t create.”
The buyouts promised pay and benefits through September in exchange for resigning. The goal, officials claimed, was to make the department leaner and more efficient, especially after confusion clouded the first round of offers. But the response went way beyond what they expected.
Originally, there was no hard target for how many should leave. But the second wave piled on top of the roughly 2,000 who already took the first offer or were let go during mass probationary firings. Now the actual number leaving could be close to 6,000.
One department spokesperson told the New York Times that the second offer was aimed at “employees who declined the first round due to confusion.” But when so many signed up to leave, management started calling people, asking them to rethink it.
Meanwhile, the Federal Aviation Administration, which makes up the bulk of the DOT’s workforce, is under heavy scrutiny. After a deadly plane crash in January and a string of near-misses, concerns about understaffing are mounting.
Despite the cuts, safety-critical jobs like air traffic controllers are supposed to be exempt. But with the FAA under the microscope, the timing couldn’t be worse.
Employees had just one week — April 1 to April 7 — to decide if they were in or out. Now, the department may be paying the price for rushing a major workforce shakeup.
