PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — President Donald Trump is trying to drastically shrink the federal government in just a matter of days by offering severance for people who quit by the end of next week. ABC News national correspondent Steven Portnoy joined KYW's Ian Bush and Carol MacKenzie on Wednesday to make sense of the latest news out of Washington.
Carol MacKenzie: Stephen, good morning. The president is offering 2 million federal employees buyouts. Some think this is a trick.
Steven Portnoy: Yeah, look, federal workers have been offered about a week to consider this offer, which the White House press secretary says amounts to a very generous payout of 8 months.
But the reason some think it's a trick is that the fine print says that essentially what you're doing is you'd be signing a paper that says that you will resign your post in the federal government effective Sept. 30 at the end of the fiscal year, with the promise — or I guess idea — that the government would put you in administrative leave status, which would mean you continue drawing down a paycheck.
Fine print says that the agency head has the ability to determine that your job is necessary to transition away your duties. Essentially, you'd have to train your replacement or figure out a way for your job to be eliminated, and it gives some discretion to the agency heads.
So, you know, there's a very limited timeline for people to decide what to do with their lives and careers, and this 8 month offer, it seems, through the end of the fiscal year, has also been questioned by legal experts, this idea that the federal government is authorized to pay people not to work. Where's that?
I don't know that we've seen anything like this on this, on this scale before. So we'll see how many people actually take the offer.
Steven, President Trump's pick for Health Secretary, RFK Jr., has his Senate confirmation hearing today. What are his prospects?
We'll see.
I mean, today he appears before the Senate Finance Committee, tomorrow before the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.
There's obviously concerns that Democrats have about his statements on vaccines.
Now, RFK Junior insists he's not anti-vaccine. And yet he has also said such things as there's no vaccine that's safe and effective. So where is he on that? I expect he'll face those questions today and tomorrow.
There's also the letter, the two-page letter, dripping with scorn and disdain, sent to the Senate by his cousin, Caroline Kennedy. She says she has an obligation to speak out that her cousin's views on vaccines are dangerous and willfully misinformed, but beyond that, his personal qualities pose even greater concern.
She calls her cousin a predator, says she has memories of him in the basement, garage, and dorm room putting baby chickens and mice in the blender so he could feed his hawks. She calls it a perverse scene of despair and violence.
She says that her cousin has gone on through life to misrepresent, lie, and cheat, that he's addicted to attention and power. That he vaccinated his own children while suggesting that others might not. That he potentially stands to financially benefit from a lawsuit that's been filed against Merck against the Gardasil HPV vaccine, where he has been paid referral fees by putting clients forward.
She says that her cousin continues to grandstand off of her own father's assassination, that's JFK's assassination, and his own father RFK's assassination.
She says she tries not to speak for her father, but "I am certain that he and my uncle Bobby and my uncle Teddy would be disgusted."
This is quite a letter.