As unions and Democrats denounced the Trump administration’s effort to slash the federal workforce through worker buyouts, some social media users have said the president’s actions parallel those of former President Bill Clinton.

“To all you Democrats freaking out over President Trump’s buyout programme, I present to you a piece of history,” LD Basler, a retired federal law enforcement officer, wrote on X. His post quoted a 1995 statement Clinton made a year after he signed the Federal Workforce Restructuring Act.

“I guess Clinton didn’t have the authority either, when he did it in the 90s? (Because) the precedent was set BY DEMOCRATS,” another X user wrote.

Is that true?

Under Clinton, the government offered mass buyouts. But there’s a key difference with what’s happening under President Donald Trump: a bipartisan Congress overwhelmingly approved Clinton’s programme following months of review.

By contrast, Trump’s “deferred resignation” offer, conversationally known as a buyout, emerged within a week of his inauguration, with lots of uncertainty about the terms.

“We spent six months, involved several hundred federal workers, and made hundreds of recommendations to Clinton and Gore, some of which they accepted, some they didn’t,” said David Osborne, an adviser to the Clinton-era review that preceded the buyouts.

The status and legality of Trump’s programme remains unclear. The administration set a midnight February 6 deadline for workers to accept the offer, but a federal judge in Massachusetts blocked that deadline and set a hearing for February 10.

Federal unions sued and wrote that the administration “has offered no statutory basis for its unprecedented offer”. The lawsuit questions whether the federal government will honour the commitment to pay participants through September 30.

The US Office of Personnel Management said 40,000 employees as of February 5 have taken the offer.

Buyouts under Clinton stemmed from a review and act by Congress

A few weeks into his presidency in February 1993, Clinton issued an executive order telling each government department or agency with more than 100 employees to cut at least 4 percent of its civilian positions over three years through attrition or “early out programmes”.

Congress paved the way for buyouts. In March 1994, Clinton signed HR 3345, the Federal Workforce Restructuring Act of 1994. The legislation passed by wide, bipartisan margins: 391-17 in the House and 99-1 in the Senate.

The legislation authorised buyouts of up to $25,000 for selected groups of employees in the executive and judicial branches except employees of the Department of Defense, Central Intelligence Agency or the General Accounting Office (now called the Government Accountability Office). The law set an April 1, 1995, deadline.

Clinton said the plan would enable the “reduction of employment” by 273,000 people by the end of 1999.

“After all the rhetoric about cutting the size and cost of Government, our administration has done the hard work and made the tough choices,” Clinton said in a statement. “I believe the economy will be stronger, and the lives of middle class people will be better, as we drive down the deficit with legislation like this.”

The legislation was an outgrowth of Clinton’s National Performance Review, which launched in March 1993 with the slogan “Make Government Work Better and Cost Less”. Clinton appointed Vice President Al Gore to lead the review and issue a report within six months.

About 250 career civil servants worked on the review and created recommendations with agency employees.

Not everyone agreed with the Clinton-Gore initiative.

“There was opposition,” but union leaders supported reducing the power of middle managers, the target of most of the reductions, and the increased role of unions in bargaining, “so they felt this was an acceptable trade-off”, John M Kamensky, National Performance Review deputy director, told PolitiFact.

Gore visited “federal offices for what are billed as ‘town meetings’ but are more like group therapy sessions that allow workers to air their feelings about their jobs”, The Chicago Tribune wrote in June 1993.

Gore’s September 1993 report made hundreds of recommendations including buyouts. Gore went on David Letterman’s late-night television show to promote the plan.

“So, have you fixed the government?” Letterman asked.

“We found a lot of really ridiculous things that cost way too much money,” Gore said.

Gore brought up government-purchased ashtrays and read the federal regulations about how the ashtrays must break when dropped. Wearing safety goggles, Gore cracked the ashtray with a hammer.

Clinton had a “very deep commitment to change, but it was not hostile”, Paul Light, New York University professor emeritus of public service, said.

Clinton’s effort to reduce the federal workforce stemmed from his campaign platform as a “new Democrat” who said the era of big government was over, said Elaine Kamarck, who helped lead the Clinton-Gore review and is now director of the Brookings Institution’s Centre for Effective Public Management.

“We had a tech revolution going on that did not require as many layers of management as the old days,” Kamarck said.

How the Trump administration wants to cut jobs

The Clinton approach sought to be surgical in determining which employees could be eased out without compromising the government’s overall mission.

The Trump approach, so far, involves buyouts and firings, without a review period or congressional action. On January 28,  the Office of Personnel Management emailed federal employees about the “fork in the road”. (Elon Musk, who heads Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency, used the same phrase in an all-staff message in 2022 after buying Twitter.)

The email said remote workers must return to work five days a week and offered “deferred resignation”. Employees had until February 6 to resign and be paid through September 30 (until the February 6 court intervention). The email hinted that layoffs were possible.

About two million employees received the offer. The civilian federal workforce is about 2.4 million, setting aside US Postal Service workers, according to the Pew Research Center. The average annual pay is about $106,000.

Some workers were exempt from the offers, including the military, Postal Service employees and workers in immigration enforcement, national security and public safety.

Trump’s programme is more generous than Clinton’s, Rachel Greszler, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, told PolitiFact. Clinton’s $25,000 offer is about $55,000 in today’s dollars. Trump’s plan says it will pay people over about eight months, so factoring in the average federal worker salary, that’s higher.

Democratic attorneys general said the payments may not be guaranteed and urged unionised workers to follow the guidance of their union officials. Democratic senators raised similar concerns about the short window for employees to decide and Trump’s authority to do this.

Trump issued an order to reclassify workers so he can more easily fire them – another subject of lawsuits. An order to end federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes led to workers being placed on paid leave.

A reporter asked White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt whether the programme was a way to purge the government of people who disagree with the president.

“That’s absolutely false,” Leavitt said. “This is a suggestion to federal workers that they have to return to work. And if they don’t, then they have the option to resign. And this administration is very generously offering to pay them for eight months.”