Best-written Federal Resignations, 2025

In the fall of 2026, we plan to publish our most ambitious anthology yet.

The most stirring, inspiring messages of our time have lately come from an unexpected quarter: federal employees, at all levels, refusing and resigning in the face of intolerable directives from the executive branch.

Some of these resignation letters have gone viral on LinkedIn or have made headlines in major papers. Many more have been sent with little fanfare and read with little interest. We think history deserves an archive of these quiet, principled voices of dissent.

This is a story worth telling.

Over 150,000 people resigned from the federal government last year. Nothing like that has happened in the history of the United States.

The majority of those 150,000 workers opted for the DRP—the Deferred Resignation Program. Elon Musk ran a similar initiative when he took over at Twitter/X. On January 28, 2025, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) followed his lead. OPM’s “Fork in the Road” memo encouraged virtually all non-military federal employees to resign. They could do so via a one-word email:

Upon review of the below deferred resignation letter, if you wish to resign:

1. Select “Reply” to this email. You must reply from your government account. A reply from an account other than your .gov or .mil account will not be accepted.
2. Type the word “Resign” into the body of this reply email. Hit “Send”.

Many federal employees had more than one word to say about their departure. This book takes you behind the scenes during one of the most tumultuous periods in our democracy’s history.

The decimation of the U.S. Civil Service is the most important story in America right now.

Whatever issue you care about—vaccines, food safety, crime, immigration, taxes, data centers, Iran, monopolies, elections, climate, education—it will change as a result of these departures.

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