Resources

As things evolve for the federal workforce and in scientific workplaces, this is a set of resources compiled from various locations across the web.

There is no affiliation with or endorsement of any programs or resources in this post. This is not financial, medical, or legal advice. This is a bank of resource information. Information included may go out of date, and may change.

RIF process info: OPM page

Know the difference between all the programs that you may be offered down the road if you think your agency will be further downsized:

  • VERA (Voluntary Early Retirement Authority) allows you to use your retirement benefits early if you meet certain age and/or time in service requirements. VERA OPM Webpage; Video about VERA
  • VSIP (Voluntary Separation Incentive Payment Authority) allows agencies that are downsizing or restructuring to offer employees lump-sum payments up to $25,000 as an incentive to voluntarily separate. It is often used in conjunction with VERA as a buyout offer for people not eligible for VERA. VISP OPM Wepbage; Video about VISP
  • Severance Pay is for full-time and part-time employees who are involuntarily separated from Federal service and meet other conditions of eligibility. It looks like most of the recent firings of probational employees are not considered to meet the eligibility requirements. Severance Pay OPM Webpage ; Video Describing Severance Pay

Some potentionally interesting datasets/repos

FedCal: Fedcal labels itself as a simple calendar library with one big goal: enable new perspective on the U.S. Government to build transparency, improve government, and bolster democracy. From the readme file: If you think about it, the U.S. Government is a big control group, of sorts. Two million people are mostly at work… or they aren’t because of holidays, weekends, military passdays, or government shutdowns. One minute the government is ‘on’, and the next it is ‘off’. Of course, it’s more complicated than that – sometimes only half, a third, or 90% of the government is impacted, which offers opportunities for even richer differential analysis (and one fedcal hopes to enable). But it’s not just shutdowns – a continuing resolution instead of a full year appropriation is another kind of binary relationship, or even whether a holiday falls on a Monday or Tuesday. fedcal aims to give you the tools to explore these relationships and their significance (…or insignificance).

RIF simulated analysis: This repository contains code and data for an analysis of reducing the federal workforce at the Core Based Statistical Area (CBSA) level by 75 percent by Jonathan Schwabish. A CBSA is a region or area defined by OMB to contain to metropolitan statistical areas/micropolitan statistical areas.

US HR Analysis Dataset: A prepocessed dataset based on 2021 OPM US Workforce data. It includes information about federal civilian employees posted within U.S territory and working full-time reducing the originial ~2 mil entries to ~30K. The entries include attributes about salary, length of service, education level, etc.

Federal Workforce visualized with code/data.