update: new hire took the “fork in the road” and now we might not be able to hire a replacement

It’s a special “where are you now?” season at Ask a Manager and I’m running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past.

Remember the letter-writer whose new hire took the DOGE “fork in the road” offer and so they might not be able to hire a replacement (#2 at the link)? Here’s the update.

The employee left on schedule as planned. I never did end up asking him why he didn’t let us know he was taking the deferred resignation option during the hiring process. I didn’t have enough time to really get to know him, given he only worked for us for two weeks (and I was on medical leave for half of that), but I wish him the best.

Around the time he left, a department-level hiring freeze was instituted and, as promised, his billet was “swept,” meaning that, even when the hiring freeze eventually lifts, we will no longer be able to hire for that position. This was a rule implemented by DOGE and outside the hands of anyone in the agency.

My junior-heavy team continued to work very long hours for quite some time after that. As I mentioned in the comments, this counted as “crisis work” which everyone in my field expects to work at some time or other. These hours were all accounted for as comp time or overtime, as is standard. My leadership has been very quick to give out cash and time-off awards for everyone working this mission. I’m very proud of my team, which has managed to rise to the occasion extremely well; my juniors are getting a trial by fire, but they’re learning so much that will directly translate into promotability down the line, and they’re becoming more confident and skilled. Morale is higher than you’d expect, as we all band together to get done what we need to get done. The pace of the work has also finally started to slow down into a much more manageable rhythm, where I very much hope it will stay.

One thing I noticed in the comments was a general conflation of anything federal government with “my employer.” Some of the commenters took the position that the “fork in the road” employee should have no issue burning bridges because “my employer” was treating employees so badly—threatening to fire probationary employees, making my team work crisis hours and not letting us hire, etc. If you don’t have experience working for the U.S. government, you may have no idea of the inutterably vast scale and scope of it. I work for, let’s say, the Underwater Basketweaving Agency (UBA), which falls under the Department of Stuff. “Departments” in the U.S. government can be anywhere from a few thousand employees to 3.2 million … let’s say the Department of Stuff falls on the larger end of those. Then you have DOGE, which is an entirely separate thing that came in with a wrecking ball to ALL departments and agencies. My employer is the UBA, which has treated all of its employees with care and respect through this entire process. UBA has to implement rules issued by the Secretary of Stuff, and it also has to implement lawful orders from DOGE. The hiring freeze, and the policy priorities that necessitated my team working crisis hours, come from the Secretary of Stuff, and hit a much larger range of agencies than just my own. The UBA, my actual employer, can’t give us extra people because of the hiring freeze, which has shut down even internal moves. And what we absolutely cannot do is tell the Secretary to, well, stuff it. (YES, the Secretary is one of those clowns in the news, and YES I would like to … but being an apolitical career bureaucrat is, alas, my calling.) I’d very much like to tell that to DOGE, too—and so would everyone, trust me—but on the plus side, they seem to have left us alone except for demanding personnel cuts, so we’re cautiously optimistic … for now.

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