Updated February 14, 2025 at 08:14 AM ET

The “Fork in the Road” email arrived in Liz Goggin’s inbox around 11 p.m. on Jan. 28.

The email blast from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) went to nearly all federal employees — some 2.3 million people across the U.S.

The memo presented federal workers with a choice: Offer your resignation by Feb. 6, in exchange for pay and benefits through the end of September. Or remain in your position, with the understanding that you may be laid off.

Goggin is among roughly 75,000 federal employees who agreed to resign, according to OPM. But she is also one of an unknown number of people who have since learned they can’t take the deal, because their positions are exempt.

Even as a federal judge has cleared the way for the Trump administration’s deferred resignation program to go forward, there remains much confusion over who agreed to exactly what — and what they’ll get in return.

Goggin still has her job, for now.

“But like, who knows?” she says, “I had regrets about telling my supervisor given the whole thing is kind of unraveling.”

A good offer “in the abstract”

By the time Goggin received the “Fork in the Road” offer, her household was already in upheaval. The Trump administration’s freeze on foreign aid was directly impacting her husband’s position with a nongovernmental organization.

“It became pretty clear that he was very likely to lose his job,” says Goggin, a scary prospect given the couple has two young children and a mortgage.

She wasn’t immediately drawn to the resignation offer.

“My initial reaction, honestly, was kind of like fear,” she says. “If a lot of people take this, what’s going to happen to services — both at my place of work at the VA, but also other agencies that are doing important work?”

Like many federal employees, she was also a bit skeptical of the deal.

But in the days that followed, OPM issued an FAQ clarifying that employees who resigned wouldn’t be expected to work during the “deferred resignation period” and would be allowed to get a second job.

“In the abstract, it did sound like a good offer,” she says. “My husband and I talked about it, and if this offer was legitimate, it seemed like, wow... I could potentially be making double salary for six months, which would give him some time to regroup and find a job he cares about.”

That weekend, she made her decision. She replied to the original email with the word “Resign” and hit send.

The following week, in an effort to be transparent, Goggin emailed her supervisor about her decision.

But a few days later, she got another surprise in her inbox: an email from the VA, exempting scores of positions from the resignation offer, including social workers.

“Which didn’t surprise me,” says Goggin. “Of course, the VA is a health care agency trying to fulfill its mission.”

A mission at odds with Trump’s executive actions?

Goggin originally came to the VA through a postgraduate fellowship, where she worked with incarcerated veterans. The experience was so rewarding she decided to stay.

These days, she works with veterans of all ages, including Vietnam War vets as well as those who deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Their life experiences are quite unique, and they also have a lot of worldly intelligence, having kind of been scattered all over the planet serving their country,” she says.

Most of her current clients are Black. As a White clinician, she says, she relies on trainings and discussions with colleagues to work through issues and figure out how to provide the best care. She says those sessions increase her awareness and understanding of other people’s experiences, including how they may be impacted by racism and other forms of oppression.

But since President Trump’s second term began, people have been pulled from trainings and discouraged from gathering to discuss such topics.

“At this point, those meetings aren’t happening,” she says.

She even wonders whether support groups for her clients, centered around race and gender, can continue.

Challenging social injustices while respecting individuals’ inherent dignity and worth are core values of social work, embedded in the profession’s code of ethics .

Now, Goggin worries whether social workers at the VA will be able to abide by that code, given Trump’s executives actions to end diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and to recognize male and female as the only two sexes .

“There’s been some vagueness as to what this actually means,” she says. “I think the atmosphere has been pretty tense, and people are really uncertain and questioning like, what is OK now?”

She says she doesn’t know what this means for the future. And she’s worried about that.

Have information you want to share about ongoing changes across the federal government? Reach out to the author. Andrea Hsu is available through encrypted communications on Signal at andreahsu.08.

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