Subject: Re: Potomac crash - VAS Aviation
It is not a given that any of them will take the offer, let alone 10%.

Of course. But that's what the folks who prepared the buyout plan expect within the range of the take rate. That's for federal employees generally, but if that's what they think the take rate might be overall, it's a plausible outcome that the take rate among air traffic controllers might hit that. It's entirely fair to talk about what the consequence would be if what they expected and intended might happen actually happens. It's not speculating into paralysis to ask about what comes next if 10% of a particular group of employees actually accepts the offer. Thinking about plausible consequences of an action is normally something one would do before taking that action, and it's worth asking whether one of the plausible outcomes of this action would be really, really bad.

Let us assume that all ten percent will NOT be simultaneous so the offer can be altered or rescinded after 2% have accepted.

Can it? I don't think that's a fair assumption, since they did an end run around the normal oversight of departments and agencies. Because of the way the federal government is structured, normally the way this type of offer would be implemented would be through the agency heads. If the President wanted all the employees to have the offer of early resignation, that would be administered with the agency heads in the loop - the offer would be implemented by the departments, and the departments would be involved with processing their responses. The department Secretaries, who have the actual knowledge of what the various agencies and employees in their departments actually do, would be included in implementing the buyout process. Normally they would be involved in planning how to handle various possible outcomes as well.

Musk (or whomever) deliberately bypassed that process. They didn't want the agency heads to be involved in the process. They set up an entire system so that they could directly reach out to all the federal employees independently. A mass email directly from OPM to the employees, and all the responses go directly from the employees to OPM, also via email. There's no role whatsoever for department or agency leadership. They might not have even known about it beforehand.

If the FAA itself was seeing the responses from their own employees, then they might realize in advance that it would be bad if too many controllers took them up on the offer. They might monitor the responses, know to look at how many of the FAA employees that took up the offer were air traffic controllers, and know to rescind the offer to air traffic controllers. It's insanely unlikely that the people who implementing this at OPM will have thought of monitoring those take rates for that specific job - if even they can in real time.

I mean, it certainly looks like no one thought to themselves what would happen if 10% of all the employees at a given VA hospital retired next week. Or if 10% of the prison guards at a given penitentiary did. Normally, if you're offering a buyout to a group of employees, you would structure it so that it was only offered to employees that you had determined you could afford to lose if they accepted it. This buyout was given to nearly all federal employees with only a few specific carveouts, and no effort to tailor it to exclude any specific jobs where it might be really problematic if there was even the expected take rate.

There's so much uncertainty (and if I may say "amateur hour") about the offer that the take rate may be much, much lower than the drafters had hoped. But there's no reason not to ask what happens if they get what they want, and there's a 10% resignation rate across all federal employees. Including among the air traffic controllers. And the people who would train any replacements.