Many federal employee separations were not truly ‘voluntary,’ survey shows

Nearly three-quarters of former federal employees who took an exit survey said they left their jobs due to pressure, incentives or an involuntary separation.

While most federal workforce separations under the Trump administration have been classified as “voluntary,” results of a new survey show that many career civil servants who left government felt coerced into doing so.

Nearly three-quarters of former federal employees who took a recent “ exit survey ” said they separated from their jobs due to pressure, incentives or an involuntary separation. Politicization of an employee’s work or agency was the leading reason respondents cited for leaving.

The survey, conducted by the Accountability and Reform Research Consortium and convened by The Volcker Alliance, collected responses from a nonrandom sample of more than 2,000 former career federal employees across 55 agencies who left on or after Nov. 5, 2024.

“So many of them felt coerced into that decision, pushed into a quote-unquote ‘voluntary’ decision,” William Resh, one of the leads on the survey project, said in an interview with Federal News Network.

In their survey analysis, Resh and survey co-lead Gary Hollibaugh built a “coercion score,” running from 0 to 1, with higher scores correlating to fewer alternatives to leaving their jobs. The score generally measures the level of pressure federal employees felt to separate from government.

Federal employees who accepted either a deferred resignation program (DRP) offer or an early retirement had an average coercion score of 0.5, the analysis found . A “typical” employee who opted into the DRP chose to do so because they believed they would otherwise be laid off or reassigned, the researchers said.

When it originally circulated the “fork in the road” email to federal employees in January 2025, the Trump administration wrote , “you will be provided with a dignified, fair departure from the federal government utilizing a deferred resignation program.”

But in ARRC’s exit survey, 85% of former federal employees “strongly disagreed” that their departures from government last year were handled with dignity and respect. In particular, employees with the lowest tenure, namely probationary workers, reported the highest levels of coercion and lowest levels of dignity in their separations out of any tenure group, the survey analysis said.

“Those who were removed or ‘RIF’ed’ … felt that there was almost no dignity in their departure,” Hollibaugh said in an interview. “And if you look at those who took a deferred resignation or an early retirement, they’re a bit lower on the dignity scale than you might expect if these were purely voluntary departures.”

The survey results also revealed that federal employees who reported high levels of job satisfaction were the ones most often removed from their jobs involuntarily.

“Those that were most satisfied, those that were presumably doing well in their jobs — were the ones that were treated with the least dignity and exited without any kind of voluntary option offered to them,” Resh said. “Maybe these cuts weren’t happening where one would expect them to happen in the name of reform.”

Although the Trump administration stated that the workforce reduction efforts would generate efficiency and eliminate waste, a vast majority of survey respondents argued instead that the cuts reduced agency capacity, expertise and services to the public.

Notably, nine in 10 respondents reported a loss of specialized expertise due to the workforce reductions — the most cited impact of the employee separations. Eight in 10 respondents said services to the public were reduced, and seven in 10 pointed to backlogs and increased risks of errors.

“By and large, people were saying that there was going to be a dramatic reduction in capacity in the agencies that were being left behind, not only in terms of the expertise that was going out the door, but also with the ways that the actual handoffs were being handled,” Hollibaugh said. “Not only do you have that structural capacity loss, but you also have steps not being taken to provide that interim transition maintenance of capacity.”

While further research is expected, Resh and Hollibaugh said the exit survey helps fill a gap in understanding how and why federal employee departures have occurred during the Trump administration.

“No one really had systematic evidence of the experience across a large population of federal workers who recently departed,” Resh said. “We saw a lot of anecdotes … but none of them had an opportunity to answer the same questions and to be able to measure the variance of that response across different people with different experiences.”

And the survey results do reveal at least one silver lining: 87% of federal employees who separated or were laid off said either “yes” or “maybe” when asked if they were open to returning to government at some point in the future.

“That gives me some hope,” Hollibaugh said.

Many respondents, though, still said their interest in returning to government would be conditional on factors including “alignment with mission” and a “changed political environment.”

When considering future recruitment and retention in government, the survey organizers expressed concerns the damage the workforce separations have done to the career civil service.

“At a very basic human level, people want to work for employers that treat them well,” Resh said. “This is a very strong signal to those who may have thought federal civil service previously, that they’re not necessarily going to be treated the way that they would want to be treated by an employer. It’s important that we understand the signal that these types of actions have towards future generations of employees.”

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Drew Friedman is a workforce, pay and benefits reporter for Federal News Network.

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