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- Like some other federal employees, Tony Ruiz received a deferred resignation email this week.
- The email offers what appears to be a buyout if he quits his job.
- Ruiz says he feels doubly targeted as a Latino and as a federal worker. But he has no plans to resign.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Tony Ruiz, a 47-year-old Army veteran who works as a Veterans Service Representative at the US Department of Veterans Affairs.
Like many federal employees, Ruiz received an email this week from the US Office of Personnel Management offering buyouts to federal workers who want to resign rather than work under the new administration. Ruiz’s employment has been verified by Business Insider.
Ruiz, who is Latino, says he feels like he’s been hit by a double whammy: the resignation offer, and, before that, a letter from higher-ups asking workers to root out any examples of efforts to promote DEI, or diversity, equity, and inclusion.
The following has been edited for length and clarity:
I was hired in February of last year to be a veteran service representative at the US Department of Veterans Affairs, which is a role based out of Los Angeles.
I work for the part of the VA that’s in charge of all veteran benefits, and my job is really to assist veterans in all kinds of things. For example, if a veteran is trying to add dependents, needs to add a disability to his award, is going back to active duty, or is asking for help when it comes to homelessness, they put in a claim and it gets routed to an adjudicator like me.
It’s a chance for us to really help the veterans.
I’m also a veteran of the US military myself. I served in the Army, with an honorable discharge in 2001. (I graduated from Basic Training in 1998.)
When I was in the military, I had a dream to work for the federal government, and so to finally join this role a year ago, I was so excited to be serving my veterans.
But in the last two weeks, things have been difficult.
First, we got an email last week from the Acting Secretary at the US Office of Personnel Management, which said they’re taking steps to close federal DEI initiatives because, they said, it’s wasteful in government, it’s shameful discrimination, and it’s dividing Americans by race.
Then it asks us to tell on our friends who are still doing DEI work and threatens us with adverse consequences if we don’t.
This first email caught all of us by surprise, and it really upset me.
Then, this week, we got an email from OPM asking us if we wanted to resign by February 6.
What really upset me was the fact that this email pretty much says to all of us, “We want you gone.” It feels like they don’t appreciate the value that we bring to the table.
How can it be that I finally got my dream job after so many years, and yet now I have this situation where they want to get rid of me in a sense — not just as a federal employee, but also as a Latino, born from Mexican immigrants, who are legal, and as an Army veteran who’s serving my country proudly?
They’re telling me I’m no good in the sense that they’re telling me I’m not wanted. And the people in the streets that are getting kicked out of the country, I feel like them, like I’m being deported from the federal government.
With the emails that we’ve gotten, I can tell you people are afraid, people are nervous. Morale has been terrible — to the point where people have been sick a lot in the last couple of weeks. And ever since the election, morale has been different. People are less talkative. It’s palpable.
But I’m not afraid. And I have no intention of resigning.
In the military, we learned about bravery, about courage, and about service to our country. But one thing I learned as well — that I think a lot of politicians and a lot of Americans forget — is in the military, we had a rule and it was very clear: If you’re given an order that’s unlawful, like murder or whatever it is, it doesn’t matter who it’s from, you are to question that order and bring it up to the higher-ups. That’s a very important thing.
In other words, we’re soldiers, we’re not robots.
Even though you’re a military member, you love your country enough to be able to say, “No, this is not right.” And so now that I’m serving my country here as a VA employee, that still stands to me.
And that’s why I’m not afraid.
