It's not a "lawful direction" if the order is illegal.

You would have to go pretty far to prove to a standard I would accept that "Go work from home, and do nothing, we will keep paying you" is an illegal order.

Firstly: Its telling these people to work from their principle place of work, their home. Something thats been commonplace since covid.

Secondly, "Do Nothing" seems like a very legal thing for these people to be doing.

I suspect that theres not a court in the land that would convict a government employee for doing nothing.

Very unclear to me that ‘do nothing and get paid for it with congressionally appropriated funds earmarked for doing something’ is legal.

In the context of general employment, "do nothing", is legal. "Wait" is legal.

Orchestrating a grand plan to waste government money by requesting multiple staff to stop working might be a grey area that the courts will decide on. But no employee would be expected to take it to court to test its validity instead of following a lawful direction.

Musk is not "requesting multiple staff to stop working" he's asking people to voluntarily resign and promising if they do they get paid until September 30 as if they had not resigned.

It's not clear to me that this is even a "direction" never-mind a "lawful direction".

The way the staff member opts into this arrangement is to write "I resign" in an email. There is no "direction" telling them to do this. It is entirely voluntary behavior on the part of the federal employee.

The issue being discussed I believe was whether they have any legal protections if they don't get paid.

I don't think anyone was claiming they'd go to jail for resigning or anything like that.

Since the promise to pay staff who resigned doesn't necessarily appear to be legal it doesn't appear they necessarily have recourse if not paid given their resignation was voluntary.

It's not about being convicted (sorry, I guess the parent comment was talking about fraud)

Suppose I was told to go home, don't do work, and am told 'we will pay you for the next 6 months.'

At a private company, that is fine, and if for some reason they do not pay, I take them to court over a contract violation.

The federal government does not follow that. If I am told by my federal gov manager that 'here is the deal, go home, we will continue to pay you, and you won't have to work.

My manager is not allowed to do that. He does not have the authority, if the gov comes back later and says 'we have reevaluated this, your manager was not allowed to offer this, sorry but you resigned, and you will not be paid the remainder of this agreement.

I do not have any ability to contest.

Now maybe you trust trump/musk/gov to follow the agreement.

The issue becomes that the government is currently only funded till March.

It is going to be a very messy budget negotiation, and part of that will be cuts. Starting with the people who agree to the offer.

Now, congress could certainly be kind, and say 'we will honor this offer and provide funding for those who have been not working, and accept their resignation.'

Or they could go 'we, as congress who are in charge of funding, did not agree to this. We don't want to pay people to do an agreement we did not agree to, but we will still accept their resignation.'

Both are possible.

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Now you as an individual have to ask yourself, what is likely:

1. You are continued to be paid thru March (personally I think likely)

2. Congress accepts the agreement, and funds the offer thru September:

This depends on how much Elon and trump go to bat for it. Maybe? I could see a larger scale buyout being part of the budget with different terms, and those that accepted this one getting rolled into it. But it will probably not be these specific terms.

I could also congress saying nope.

I also don't really think trump or Elon care outside getting people out. (See their previous refusals to pay)

This is why I think rolling this into a proper, different offer is likely, especially if they do not meet their targets for worker reduction.

I believe they will not make it a priority to pay people as according to the agreement.

Also remember the Republican congress has 2 votes in the house, and some of those are deficit hawks that have not seen spending they do not want to cut, they may be hard to convince that the should pay a salary for someone who has 'resigned'.

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So what's the benefit?

If you accept this now, you open up substantial risk of only getting paid till March.

There will probably be another offer In March this one approved by Congress.

The offer will be different than this one, if it is worse, those that 'accept' this offer will rolled over to it, as the current offer has no legal basis.

If the new offer is better, those who accept this one will be forced to keep it (I assume, that congress would retroactively authorize this to save money.)

So unless you have something lined up, or already planned to leave in March. Your best bet is to not take the offer and wait until after budget negotiations are done.