I just got Trump’s “Buyout” deals on my job. Let me tell you how it goes.

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The author is a federal official who has been used by a pen name to protect them and their family from reprisals.

The new Trump Administration’s efforts to both get hold of and run the federal workforce has also been a dystopian father, climax Tuesday night, after the Office of Personnel Administration sent an E email offering what the media has described as a “buyout “To all federal employees. This saga began shortly after Donald Trump joined when anyone who claimed the Authority’s authority began spaming federal workers with e emails demanding answers. In a breath, the message asked all employees to answer “yes” to confirm that the system was working, but it also warned employees to be careful with the content of E emails coming to them. Meanwhile, the note itself was marked, for recipients with a government’s E -mail account, such as coming from an “(external)” source -and thus not necessarily one to trust.

Then, Tuesday night, federal workers were sent an E email announcing a “fork in the way.” Again, the message was marked by government servers as “(external).” This e email, of which much was copied and deployed from a similar message sent to Twitter employees after Elon Musk – Trump’s choice to lead his efforts to review Civil Service, otherwise known as the Department of Government Efficiency – Took Over The Company, declares the federal workforce undergoing significant changes. Anyone who did not want to participate in this new vision was invited to respond to the “resignation” to the marked-as-Executive e-mail address and collect six months’ salary without having to do any additional work while looking for a New job. The details of this offer are confusing, conflict with later OM “often asked questions” about the program and appear to run after many years of legal caps on severance packages.

Welcome to the Government of Chatbot.

This latest buyout directive is evocative by AI Gobbledygook, in addition to being a copy-and-pasta job from Musk’s Twitter utilization. When technologists evaluate a new AI language tool, the go-to-metric is generally not the accuracy of its product or even the consistency of its answer. That’s it commitment. Substance is pushed aside in the pursuit of simply keeping human eyeballs trained on its messages for as long as possible. Once considered to be a power of attorney to the ability of the content to be “valuable” or “worth”, the attention in itself has become the item we are after: Look, likes, click, play the next episode. Unfortunately, one of the easiest ways of engaging people is is to reassure them.

Like a chatbot in training, Musk-Miller-Trump administration is not a principled political entity dealing with drug, consistency or competence. In the administration Executive Order With regard to Tiktok, for example, the president endeavored to grant rights to private companies in a section (doj “shall not take steps to enforce the law or impose any sanctions on any entity for any non -compliance with the law”), while it Specifically, gift to Tiktok in another (“This order is not intended for and does not create any right or advantage, material or procedural, enforceable by law or in equity by any party against the United States”). This was a presidential pinky wound with his fingers crossed.

Even before Tuesday’s e-mail, the original, outside the Government Department of Government Efficiency Project, speared by Musk immediately run afoul of rules that protect against corruption that prevent our democracy from slipping into an oligarchy. When the administration was about bringing the project into the government, in the meantime, that immediately run afoul of protective measures against citizen monitoring and privacy protection that prevent our democracy from slipping into an autocracy.

Which brings us back to buyout. Putting Musk’s failed promises to Twitter employees who had hoped for a similar buyout, the vision of the federal workforce announced the IE email is no more sensible than Tiktok -Operating Order, no more effective at considering government protection than that Early Doge effort. A “pillar” of this supposed new federal workforce presumes the flexible task and redistribution of anyone who works for the federal government for whatever task, agency or group the president wants when he wants. In other words, it assumes that the president can use the priority powers that are exclusive to Congress when it sets its budgets and leads funds against or away from different mandates.

In another pillar, the vision claims the president’s right to reclassify federal works into wills. But to do that, he had to adopt new rules, legislation that requires planning, process, public comment and (probably) legal review. And to skip this process, he had to revoke the law of administrative procedure, a step that should demand a congress act and (probably) legal review.

If it sounds like a lot of bureaucracy that is worth time. He can change material legislation on a whim – banking codes, security regions, trade union protection, taxes.

These are not the actions of a thoughtful, careful or competent government. It is not the one imagined by our founders or present through the first nearly two and a half centuries of the American experiment. This is the empty scrap of a bot trained on revenge fantasy scripts that lack a fourth grade understanding of government branches and power separation.

But hey, it’s good for grabbing headlines.

And of course, what do you do with a bot you’ve trained to be maximally engaging? You put it Behind a PaywallMake it a subscription service.