Lawmakers with significant federal energy, environment and science projects underway in their home states shuddered Wednesday at the prospect that thousands of civil servants involved in those efforts could resign en masse in the coming months.
The Trump administration’s action Tuesday allowing millions of federal employees to submit a “deferred resignation” prompted cheers from fiscal hawks excited about the cost-cutting potential — and concern from others about the fate of a wide range of federal programs focused on everything from energy permitting to food safety.
There were open questions among lawmakers about the legality of President Donald Trump’s proposal to continue for several months paying a still-unknown number of federal employees who will choose to leave their posts in the coming days.
But the potential impacts of the move on federal infrastructure projects, land management efforts, scientific research and more were enough to scare some members on both sides of the aisle into taking action.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), a senior appropriator whose home state has one of the highest numbers of federal employees per capita, said she had previously talked to Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy, to ask for his help in keeping federal agencies sufficiently staffed.
At a Republican conference lunch last week where Miller was invited to speak to senators about Trump’s early executive orders, Murkowski approached him to express her gratitude for the administration’s moves to boost energy production in Alaska by lifting restrictions on oil and gas production, mining and logging on federal lands.
She also warned him, she said, of the potentially unforeseen challenges of trying to advance those goals while decimating the federal workforce in the name of government efficiency.
“I said, ‘We’re going to need help from you, because in order for us to move forward with these projects, we have to have folks at [the Bureau of Land Management] and within some of the other federal agencies there to do the permitting,’” Murkowski recounted. “So we see that there’s a hiring freeze, but we need to know that we’re not going to lose these people that we need to process this.”
Murkowski said Miller told her that agency heads will work to avoid having resignations adversely affect efforts to carry out Trump’s executive orders.
The move to incentivize hundreds of thousands of civil servants to quit their jobs by Feb. 6 is in line with the stated goals of Russell Vought, Trump’s pick to lead the Office of Management and Budget. It also complements the efforts of Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency, the operation led by tech mogul Elon Musk to streamline government operations.
The Senate Budget Committee will vote Thursday on advancing Vought’s nomination to the full Senate as he faces a firestorm of criticism from lawmakers over the administration’s announcement this week that they would freeze a wide swath of federal loans and grants.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) told POLITICO’s E&E News last month that Republicans would be looking for ways to reduce staffing at federal agencies that they feel became bloated under the Biden administration or that they believe are overstepping their authority, something Vought advocated for when he served in the first Trump administration.
“We saw agencies like EPA during Covid get bulked up,” Scalise said. “I think a lot of us have been wanting to rightsize government for a long time, to go back to pre-Covid levels at a lot of these agencies — not just EPA, but clearly they’re one of them.”
Trump last week signed a number of executive orders freezing infrastructure, climate and clean energy funding to help with that rightsizing. Some of Congress’ biggest climate hawks said agency staff losses would be another critical blow to efforts to keep up momentum for those kinds of projects.
“This is going to be an attempt to systematically undermine all of the wind and solar, all of the clean air and clean water, all of the protections which have been put on the books,” said Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.).
Legal questions
Initial reports referred to the program as a buyout, but the details are more complicated — and murky. Federal employees would be allowed to bypass return-to-office mandates, but many may not be able to stop working until they formally leave the government in September.
Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), ranking member on the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, said Democratic leaders were “looking into” the legality of the administration’s proposal. Democrats discussed the issue during their lunch Wednesday.
Virginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine, whose state is home to many of the capital-area civil servants, called Trump’s severance proposal a “fake offer” that is “worth nothing” — in part because “there’s no budget line item to pay people who are not showing up for work.”
Multiple Republican appropriators suggested Wednesday they were not clear on whether the president has the legal or constitutional right to offer deferred-resignation severance packages to millions of federal employees.
Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), chair of the Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee, said the maneuver is permissible under current spending law but refused to explain how. “I think it’s allowable, and I think it’s a good idea,” he said.
Virginia Democratic Sen. Mike Warner said he did not think the “rule of law is the top priority” of the Trump administration given constitutional concerns about the recent funding freeze. He also stressed the impacts that mass resignations could have on research and especially federal food safety programs.
“If our best scientists quit, if our folks who are protecting our food safety quit, what is that going to mean?” he said.
“This may be the way certain people run tech businesses,” Warner said in an apparent nod to Musk, “but it’s not the way you run an enterprise that is critical to our national security and the safety and welfare of the American people.”
Several lawmakers — Republicans and Democrats — stressed that the process could help the administration pinpoint which employees are not interested in doing their work, making it easier to fire them later on.
A number of Republicans also suggested Wednesday that thousands of federal employees were already not doing their jobs because they work from home.
“For people that would prefer to stay at home, this might be a really good way of identifying them and saving dollars for the taxpayer,” said Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.). “If there’s a way to move this through and actually save dollars while making the federal government more efficient, I think most of us are in favor of that.”