These feds took Trump’s ‘fork’ deal. Then they got fired.

Dave Elmstrom knew what he would do when the Trump administration’s resignation offer, titled “Fork in the Road,” landed in his inbox: take it.

Elmstrom, a probationary employee at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, had a job giving green-energy grants to farmers: an immediate target for Trump, he suspected.

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He replied “resign” on Feb. 5, according to an email reviewed by The Washington Post. He also signed a resignation agreement, although no supervisor could tell him where to send it.

Eight days later, Elmstrom was fired for “performance.” A human resources worker told him probationary employees were no longer eligible for the “fork” offer. Plunged into doubt, he pondered tapping into his savings – until, hours after The Washington Post contacted the Office of Personnel Management on Wednesday to ask about cases like Elmstrom’s, he received an email declaring he was accepted after all.

“This whole thing has just been a bundle of uncertainty,” he said. “It’s very disorganized. I feel like they’re just making it up as they go.”

The Trump administration’s sweeping offer of deferred resignations – which the government says will allow workers to get paid until September – was to many a guarantee of short-term financial security amid the tumult of massive cuts in the federal workforce. But, across agencies, some probationary employees were mistakenly fired after taking or attempting to take the “fork” offer, according to interviews with dozens of federal workers and records obtained by The Post.

And now, administration officials and agency leads are scrambling to fix their blunders and get back in touch with employees who have lost access to government emails and work devices.

An official with the Office of Personnel Management said that pool of workers, who have fewer job protections than permanent employees, were always eligible for the deal. But The Post documented instances of such firings at several agencies, including the Education Department, the Small Business Administration and the U.S. Forest Service. Officials with at least two agencies, the USDA and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told probationary employees they were deemed ineligible for the “fork” offer by the Office of Personnel Management, known as OPM, according to emails obtained by The Post.

On Wednesday, some agencies began to issue corrections, reinstating fired workers to the resignation program. It was not clear how many employees were affected or how many of the approximately 200,000 probationary employees working across the government took the deal. Tens of thousands of them have been fired in the past week, according to a Washington Post analysis, but the administration has not provided an official tally.

“This is obviously a case of the right hand not talking to the left hand in every possible way,” said Debra D’Agostino, a founding partner of the D.C.-based Federal Practice Group, which represents civil servants. With many supervisors left out of decisions on whom to let go, agencies are likely to have neglected to cross-reference lists of employees who took the resignation offer with lists of those on probation, she said.

“It was just, pull the trigger and clean up the mess later,” she said.

The apparent miscommunication between OPM and agencies, and the resulting back-and-forth for workers, is the latest issue for the Trump administration as it rushes to downsize the 2.3 million-person civilian workforce. A push to fire thousands over Presidents’ Day weekend led to errors large and small, and the swift reversals of some dismissals, as the administration sought to unfire essential workers such as those who bolster the nation’s nuclear defense.

The ensuing turmoil has upended people’s lives, stressing employees unsure of their status who have begun applying for other jobs, or unemployment benefits, and calculating how to survive on a shoestring budget. But even for workers skeptical of the offer, seeing the administration apparently fail to keep its “fork” promises stung, especially given how frequently – and loudly – the White House and billionaire Elon Musk had trumpeted the benefits of the program.

The Trump administration kept promising “we should have no fear that it would be honored,” said a U.S. Forest Service employee who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. The employee tried to accept the resignation deal Feb. 6, only to be fired three months before she would have graduated out of her probationary status.

The government-wide email blast sent Jan. 28 was an opening shot in the Trump administration’s campaign to radically reduce the federal workforce. The email told workers to reply “resign” if they wanted to accept and said they had until Feb. 6 to decide.

A legal challenge soon followed and the program was paused, then lifted, creating confusion over the deadline. An OPM spokesperson said 75,000 employees accepted the deal, which the administration abruptly closed to participants on Feb. 12.

Throughout the turbulent court proceedings, confused federal employees in group chats and online forums questioned whether the offer was legitimate. Some urged their colleagues not to accept, pointing out that the “fork” email resembled one that Musk – who is spearheading efforts to shrink the government through his work with the U.S. DOGE Service – sent to employees at Twitter, before he reduced the workforce by 80 percent and refused to pay promised severance.

Administration officials repeatedly reassured employees that the offer was real. White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told reporters that the resignation program was a “very generous, once-in-lifetime offer.”

An FAQ on OPM’s site published about the program reads, “Will I really get my full pay and benefits … through September 30 …?” And it promises the answer is “Yes.”

“The government will honor the deferred resignation offer,” OPM posted on X on Feb. 6.

At no point did any public communication from OPM state that probationary employees were ineligible. The FAQ says “all full-time federal employees” could resign, except for military personnel, U.S. Postal Service employees, workers in immigration enforcement, national security and public safety, and “other positions specifically excluded” by agencies.

But some agencies evidently came to believe probationary workers shouldn’t be allowed to resign early.

When Elmstrom, the USDA worker, received notice he was terminated, he swiftly wrote to the director of human resources to complain.

“The Deferred Resignation Program is an OPM program,” the director replied. “Personnel terminated during their probationary period were deemed recently as not eligible for the program.”

A similar email went out on Feb. 17 to employees at FEMA, according to a message obtained by The Post. “If you elected to participate in the deferred resignation program,” the email stated, “a determination was made that probationary employees are not eligible and will be terminated.”

Amid the confusion, at least one probationary employee has been fired twice, from a post at the Small Business Administration.

First, she was mistakenly fired on a Friday, then reinstated on a Monday, according to emails she provided to The Post.

That same afternoon in early February, tired and dispirited, she accepted the resignation offer, even though she loved her job and had hoped to spend her career working for the federal government, she said. Twenty-four hours later, she checked her email to find she was fired again – effective within an hour.

As she was submitting applications for other jobs a week later, she got a message from her boss: She was admitted into the deferred resignation program after all. OPM had sent a formal agreement to her work email – which she could no longer access, because she had been terminated. Her boss forwarded it, and she signed it.

At this point, she has little confidence she will get paid through September, and no trust in the people leading efforts to shrink the government.

“You just don’t know what they’re going to do next,” she said. “There’s no rhyme or reason.”

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Lisa Rein, Brianna Sacks and Emily Davies contributed to this report.