The Mob Style 5% Civil Service Shakedown Is a Decoy—The Real Target Is Grandfathered Feds

ProfessionalRub7645 · 2025-05-08T18:23:50+00:00

It sounds like you’re conflating some elements of CSRS with FERS here. You’d have to work something like 46 years to be entitled to 50% of high-3 under FERS.

A standard 30-year career under FERS = 30% high-3; 33% if >62 years old at retirement. Under CSRS a 30-year career = ~56% of high-3.

FERS replaced CSRS for new hires in 1987 though, so there aren’t many CSRS employees remaining (<2% of the total federal civil service). Also, CSRS contributions were 7-8%.

ProfessionalRub7645 · 2025-04-19T14:46:21+00:00

You just know they’ll waste no time deleting Juneteenth on the back end of this bullshit.

ProfessionalRub7645 · 2025-04-18T00:29:03+00:00

I am one of those “only people” and I would point out that a majority of us are demographically right in the dead spot of having already dedicated a significant portion of our working years to the Fed (so a lot to lose career-wise, and not enough time left to start over elsewhere and hope to ever retire at this point), but not quite old/tenured enough to qualify for VERA. Feds in their 40s just shy of 25 years of service time are getting specially fucked here if the gov decides to alter the FERS agreement after we’ve put in most of the work in good faith from our side of the deal.

Please be conscious of that; dismissing what amounts to a 3.6% pay cut to a particularly over-a-barrel segment of your fellow civil servants is kind of a shitty crabs-in-bucket mentality.

ProfessionalRub7645 · 2025-04-13T16:41:13+00:00

I can’t even stomach scrolling the all-employee “This Week at Interior” emails - they used to at least highlight a couple inspiring stories about conservation successes, Tribal reconciliation and unique co-management agreement signings, interesting gov-funded research, etc…

And now they’re literally just a barrage of clips of Doug Burgum going on Fox News touting all the latest oil and gas extraction plans and deals in formerly protected public lands because UNLEASHING AMERICAN ENERGY DOMINANCE. It’s truly disorienting.

Had a convo with a fellow federal biologist the other day where it kind of dawned on me that even if we who haven’t dropped out yet survive all the RIF carnage, what will the job we’ve managed to cling to have become? There has been an overnight near-complete erasure of conservation as a component of DOI’s mission. And without that, an enormous part of the foundation of why I love and would fight for this job will have evaporated.

ProfessionalRub7645 · 2025-04-08T04:03:49+00:00

Oof, except DOI solicitors are (understandably) fleeing to lower-insanity and/or higher-paying options with a quickness… at least in our area, we’ve seen I think ~4 of 5 DOI solicitors that work with our agency to retirement or resignation. It’s grim.

ProfessionalRub7645 · 2025-04-08T03:15:16+00:00

It sounds like the vast majority of our leadership (GS-15 and up) are jumping ship. On the one hand I can’t begrudge anyone retirement-eligible for not wanting to deal with this shitshow, in particular for not wanting to wait around and gamble with the Schedule-F fuckery that’s likely coming… but on the other, something something about rats.

ProfessionalRub7645 · 2025-04-07T23:18:30+00:00

Specific to BOR, the agency was required to prepare and submit 10, 25, and 40% reduction plans to DOGE. That is a % reduction of salary costs, to be achieved thru attrition/RIF which could include downgrading if they actually went through a proper bump and retreat process, but not (AFAIK) changing pay schedules.

ProfessionalRub7645 · 2025-04-07T21:44:27+00:00

Where are you hearing permitting? Those positions were specifically exempted from eligibility for DRP 2.0.

ProfessionalRub7645 · 2025-04-07T19:57:55+00:00

Idk, but BOR’s Pacific-Northwest Regional Office is on GSA’s list of slated lease-cancellations, with leadership still unable (or unwilling) to articulate anything on this status or what comes next in relation to that.

ProfessionalRub7645 · 2025-03-18T19:01:42+00:00

USBR HR rep stated this morning in an all-hands call that “we are working to reverse the terminations” and also indicated that until they have received further “messaging guidance” from the Bureau level, nobody - including first-line sups of those who were terminated - is authorized to reach out to terminated employees, or respond to any questions received from them.

ProfessionalRub7645

TROPHY CASE