Trump’s “Buyout” Deadline Is Here—With One Crucial Caveat

The U.S. Department of Education chose to kindly let employees know that Donald Trump’s “buyout” offer for federal employees, should they accept it, may be yanked away from them at any moment.

Last week, the president announced that he’d be giving federal workers the option of full-time in-office work or quitting with a buyout and severance pay through September 30. This is a key strategy in his effort to completely transform the federal government’s bureaucratic apparatus.

However, three Department of Education officials told NBC News on Wednesday that there were some massive caveats to this policy. The department’s new chief of staff, Rachel Oglesby, and Jacqueline Clay, its chief human capital officer, told employees that the secretary of education could nullify the agreement or the government could simply stop paying, as employees would waive their right to legal claims if they take the buyout deal. Employees have until Thursday to make a decision.

“It sounded like a commercial for a used car dealership, like, ‘Act now, one day only,’” one department official who was at the meeting said.

The Department of Education and the Office of Personnel Management, the agency responsible for managing federal employees, has pushed back with a memo that claims to assure the government’s accountability on payments. That memo includes a sample agreement that gives the “sole discretion” to waive the buyout to the “agency head” and “waives all rights to challenge the resignation before the Merit Systems Protection Board or any other forum.” More than 40,000 of the two million–plus federal government employees have accepted the buyout as of Wednesday.

Donald Trump is continuing to push his crazy plan for the United States to take over Gaza, even after the idea was soundly rejected by world leaders. In a post on Truth Social Thursday morning, the president said the “Gaza Strip would be turned over to the United States by Israel at the conclusion of fighting.”

“The Palestinians, people like Chuck Schumer, would have already been resettled in far safer and more beautiful communities, with new and modern homes, in the region,” Trump said, showing his true regard for the Palestinians by using them to insult the Senate minority leader.

“They would actually have a chance to be happy, safe, and free. The U.S., working with great development teams from all over the World, would slowly and carefully begin the construction of what would become one of the greatest and most spectacular developments of its kind on Earth. No soldiers by the U.S. would be needed! Stability for the region would reign!!!” Trump’s post said.

The post flies in the face of White House officials’ attempt to clarify Trump’s harebrained idea, which he first mentioned during a joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday evening. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Wednesday that Trump only intended to “temporarily” transfer the 2.1 million Palestinians in Gaza to neighboring countries, such Egypt and Jordan.

The “greatest development teams from all over the world” Trump referred to in his post presumably would be real estate developers, as opposed to humanitarian organizations who help displaced people rebuild their lives and homes. The president is trying to end America’s humanitarian initiatives by trying to close the U.S. Agency for International Development, and his son-in-law Jared Kushner is a real estate developer who sees Gaza’s destruction as an opportunity for profit.

While Trump promises not to use any U.S. troops to transfer Gaza’s population, sending Israeli troops to do the job would reignite the conflict, which continues to simmer despite a more than two-week-old ceasefire. Palestinians have universally rejected the plan, as have America’s Arab allies, who presumably would be taking them in. How, then, does Trump intend to carry out his scheme?

Donald Trump wants CBS to do more than pay the price for conducting a sit-down interview with Kamala Harris before Election Day.

Since the interview aired in September, the president has insisted that the network had selectively edited Harris’s answers to a question regarding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—a detail made all the more confusing since CBS’s 60 Minutes and Face the Nation cut and aired different portions of her answer on different days.

“CBS and 60 Minutes defrauded the public by doing something which has never, to this extent, been seen before,” Trump posted on Truth Social early Thursday. “They 100% removed Kamala’s horrible election changing answers to questions, and replaced them with completely different, and far better, answers, taken from another part of the interview.”

CBS has maintained that the interview with the Democratic presidential candidate was only edited for time but that both clips were cut from the same extended answer to the question.

Trump sued the network for $10 billion after the interview, claiming that the different clips were tantamount to “election interference” and merited CBS losing its broadcast license. Trump also argued, at the time, that Harris should drop out of the presidential race over the GOP-baked scandal.

After a review of the interview, the Federal Communications Commission released a transcript Wednesday revealing that the two answers were in fact cut from the same cloth and had both been provided by the former vice president during an extended 21-second response.

Anna Gomez, a Democratic commissioner on the FCC, said that the raw footage of the interview provided “no evidence” that CBS violated broadcasting guidelines.

“Having now seen these materials, I see no reason to continue pursuing this investigation,” Gomez said in a statement. “The FCC should now move to dismiss this fishing expedition to avoid further politicizing our enforcement actions.”

Still, the company’s apparent innocence is backdropped by a decision from Paramount, its parent company, to pursue a settlement with Trump as it rushes to close a merger with SkyDance. Trump’s new Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr has said that the editing controversy would “likely arise” in his review of the deal.

“Each excerpt reflects the substance of the vice president’s answer,” 60 Minutes said in a statement Wednesday. “As the full transcript shows, we edited the interview to ensure that as much of the vice president’s answers to 60 Minutes’ many questions were included in our original broadcast while fairly representing those answers. 60 Minutes’ hard-hitting questions of the vice president speak for themselves.”

Donald Trump’s announcement that the United States will take over Gaza and ethnically cleanse the area for new developments is such an extreme and grotesque idea, even his own people can’t conceal their disgust.

Trump announced Tuesday that he wants the U.S. to become the steward for the territory it funded the devastating destruction of for more than a year, and develop it into the “the Riviera of the Middle East.” All they needed to do is find some “beautiful area” to relocate its Palestinian residents—an ethnic cleansing by any definition. 

During an appearance on Fox News’s The Five, host Jessica Tarlov explained the widespread criticism of the president’s “untenable” plan.  

“If he’s such a humanitarian then you take those two million people and you bring them here to the U.S., which is the country you are in charge of, and you resettle them. I’m just saying, you can’t force them down other people’s throats,” Tarlov said.

“If you want to know how crazy the idea is, though, you have to look no further than Susie Wiles’s face as he said it,” Tarlov said, referring to a photograph of Trump’s White House chief of staff looking particularly horrified as the president announced his plan to ethnically cleanse all the Palestinians in Gaza.

Tarlov explained that Wiles’s wide-eyed face seemed to telegraph, “Oh my God, what is he saying?”

Trump reportedly unveiled his plan to take over Gaza just two hours before announcing it on live television.

Donald Trump openly speculated about paying himself millions to build a ballroom in the White House while signing an anti-trans executive order Wednesday.

Trump was signing the “No Men in Women’s Sports” executive order in the White House’s East Room and, as he is prone to do, went off on a tangent, remarking how the room was so full that many people couldn’t get in.

“This room is packed. You know, I offered to build a ballroom, I’m very good at building ballrooms. I build beautiful ballrooms, and I actually offered to build a ballroom for the White House. I was going to build it right there,” Trump said, pointing behind him.

“I was going to build a beautiful, beautiful ballroom like I have at Mar-a-Lago, as beautiful as it can be. It was going to cost about a hundred million dollars. I offered to do it, and I never heard back,” Trump added to laughter, noting that he made the offer to the Biden administration. “So, I’m going to try and make the offer to myself, you know, because we could use a bigger room.”

While Trump added that such a project “would cost nothing,” and “I’ll spend the whole thing myself,” he has a reputation for charging the government (and taxpayers, by extension) exorbitant amounts of money.

For example, during his first term, he reportedly charged the Secret Service “300 percent or more above the authorized government per diem” for accommodation at his hotels, and his political work has also resulted in millions of dollars going to his personal coffers. Trump will likely bring up his ballroom idea again, and in all likelihood, it won’t be the last far-fetched, exorbitant project he proposes.