The Trump administration has urged government workers to quit their "lower productivity jobs" and seek work in the private sector, and to take a vacation to a "dream destination," sparking outrage among civil servants.
The guidance issued on Thursday night comes as President Donald Trump embarks on a massive makeover of the U.S. government, firing and sidelining hundreds of civil servants in his first steps toward downsizing the bureaucracy and installing more loyalists.
The Trump administration sent a memo to 2 million government workers on Tuesday about a "deferred resignation program"
Government workers reacted with outrage in an online Reddit forum where they meet to discuss the daily upheavals to the federal bureaucracy. Many called the advice demeaning and said the memo made it less likely that they would take the offer to quit.
The moves by the Trump administration to cut the federal workforce, contained in a flurry of executive orders and other actions, have stunned and alarmed government workers and triggered turmoil inside their agencies.
"Outright insulting," one worker wrote. Another, referring to the deadly midair collision between an Army helicopter and a passenger jet in Washington on Wednesday night, said, "I saw thousands of federal employees working at the site of a tragic plane crash today. None of them being unproductive."
Tim Kauffman, a spokesperson for the American Federation of Government Employees, the biggest federal employees union with 800,000 members, hit out at the suggestion that government jobs are "low productivity."
"These are people working in prisons, working on our border, working at our airports," he told Reuters. "It's clear they are trying to get a ton of workers to quit, to make it so miserable that they want to leave."
