HHS Staffers Just Became The Latest Federal Employees To Receive A Cash Offer To Voluntarily Resign

President Donald Trump has rewritten the rules in D.C. when it comes to cutting the budget.

With his Department of Government Efficiency rooting out waste and inefficiency across all agencies, he’s also looking for innovative ways to cut the bloated federal workforce.

One strategy that seems to have worked well so far involves presenting employees with a buyout offer that essentially pays them a lump sum in exchange for their agreement to resign.

The Department of Health and Human Services became the latest to offer such a payment.

As The Hill reported, thousands of employees will have until Friday to decide whether they want to accept the $25,000 offer:

The offer was sent to staff across HHS, which includes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration, The Associated Press reported.

The email went to a “broad population of HHS employees” and comes just days before the department has to report to the Trump administration and its Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Trump signed an executive order last month directing all agencies to prepare for a reduction in force, looking for a way to have “large-scale” layoffs.

HHS is one of the government’s more costly agencies, with a $1.7 trillion annual budget largely spent on Medicare and Medicaid services, the AP noted.

The Trump administration saw immediate results from similar strategies implemented last month across other agencies:

300,000 federal workers are packing their bags as voluntary buyouts hit 75,000 and Trump fires over 200,000 “probationary” bureaucrats.

There's tens of thousands more to come from USAID and EPA to the FBI and IRS 🥳 pic.twitter.com/jxbtSxLTVg

— Peter St Onge, Ph.D. (@profstonge) February 18, 2025

DOGE: When Clinton paid 114,000 federal workers $25,000 to resign and NOT return to federal employment for 5 years no one sued him. Now that Trump is giving 40,000 federal workers an 8 month paid vacation he's sued by the unions and, ironically, a Clinton-appointed judge blocked… pic.twitter.com/JHV04P4w4S

— @amuse (@amuse) February 6, 2025

BREAKING: 20,000 United States federal employees accepted the Trump administration's offer to leave their positions but be paid through September, per Axios

— unusual_whales (@unusual_whales) February 4, 2025

In the days following the election and months before his confirmation as HHS secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. laid out his vision for staffing the agency, per Newsweek:

Prompted by a question from an audience member regarding what he would do if he could wave a “magic wand,” Kennedy responded: “We need to act fast, and we want to have those people in place on January 20 so that on January 21, 600 people are going to walk into offices at NIH, and 600 people are going to leave.”

Newsweek reached out to NIH, a representative of Kennedy, and the Trump campaign via email for comment.

The NIH is a federal agency that is part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and serves as the nation’s medical research agency. Its workforce is similar to that of universities and academic medical centers. NIH employees work in research settings, clinics and in the field worldwide. Many are world-renowned experts in their respective disciplines.

As of September 30, 2021, the NIH had 18,718 employees, according to its website.

Kennedy previously proposed in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that half of NIH’s research budget should be spent on “preventative, alternative and holistic” medicines.

Here’s some additional coverage of the recent HHS buyout offer: