Amy*, a federal US government employee working for homeland security who was hired by the Joe Biden administration’s refugee programme, has not left her phone out of her sight since last Tuesday, when the Elon Musk-led push for mass voluntary redundancies of government workers began.
Since the US office of personnel management (OPM) sent nearly all of the federal government’s 3 million employees an email offering them deferred resignations and warning that, if they choose to stay, they may be laid off or reassigned, US career civil servants have been weighing their options.
