Government buyouts don’t cut waste, they kill expertise
There’s a dangerous idea that you can just delete parts of the federal government — just highlight, backspace and watch the system reorganize itself, good as new. But we’re about to learn what happens when you hit delete without knowing what you’re erasing.
More than 20,000 federal employees have reportedly said yes to the Trump administration’s buyout offer: resign by Feb. 6, get eight months’ salary and walk away. (A federal judge paused the buyout program on Thursday until a Monday hearing.)
These workers will be walking out of nuclear labs and cybersecurity command centers. They are taking their decades of expertise — their knowledge of complex systems, their ability to navigate chaos — and leaving.
And when the next crisis comes? We’ll be looking at the space where they used to be while power grids shut down.
The administration is selling this as a win for taxpayers — a clean-up of unnecessary bureaucracy. That’s not what’s happening. Buy-outs don’t cut waste. They cut expertise.
The federal workers who take buyouts are the ones with the most marketable skills, who can land high-paying private-sector jobs tomorrow. The most senior experienced nuclear engineers, the cybersecurity experts keeping foreign adversaries out of our power grid — these are the people who leave first.
The ones left behind? Among them will be those who didn’t have other options.
The Trump administration is going to learn basic government functions the hard way — by breaking them and seeing what happens. But we don’t need to go through with this buyout to understand what will happen. Just look at what has happened in the past when buyouts were offered on a smaller scale.
Los Alamos National Laboratory lost 27 percent of its senior nuclear scientists in previous buyout rounds, leading to $450 million in recruitment and training costs. The Department of Energy spent $2.1 million in buyouts for 42 senior engineers, then spent $5.8 million recruiting their replacements at higher salaries.
But the most expensive costs aren’t even the direct replacement expenses — they’re the catastrophic failures that occur when critical expertise disappears. When the Pentagon’s cyber command lost 18 percent of its senior technical staff to buyouts, it led to $380 million in emergency contractor costs. When FEMA lost 23 percent of its experienced disaster response coordinators, it required $250 million in rushed training programs.
The pattern across government is clear: Poorly planned buyouts don’t save money — they force agencies to pay experienced employees to leave, then hire emergency contractors at two to three times the cost, recruit permanent replacements at higher salaries, spend millions on accelerated training programs and deal with costly failures during expertise gaps.
This isn’t about defending bureaucracy. It’s about understanding that government functions aren’t simple systems you can disrupt with blanket policies. Real government efficiency requires understanding that our most valuable resource isn’t office space or equipment — it’s expertise. Every time we pay our best talent to leave through poorly planned buyouts, we’re not saving money. We’re paying premium prices to create expertise gaps that cost much more to fill.
The Trump administration’s approach — from the grant freeze to the buyout offer — reveals a dangerous pattern of treating complex government systems like simple business units that can be downsized at will. But government isn’t a business, and expertise isn’t interchangeable. When Trump blames DEI for aviation accidents while simultaneously launching policies that would gut aviation expertise, he demonstrates exactly why we can’t afford to let simplistic solutions undermine complex systems that keep Americans safe.
Until we recognize that government efficiency requires deep understanding of how these systems actually work, we will continue to see this pattern: hasty policies that create expensive chaos, followed by costly scrambles to rebuild lost capability. This government efficiency fantasy is about to cost us billions in fixes to avoidable problems.
It is time to give up the dangerous illusion that you can casually dismantle complex systems without understanding what you’re breaking.
Cheryl Kelley is a former senior government official with experience across five U.S. Cabinet agencies, including serving as director of planning, management and budget. She is an adjunct fellow at the Pell Center at Salve Regina University and the author of “An Informed Citizenry: How the Modern Federal Government Operates” and the novel “Radical, An American Love Story.”
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