He Took Musk’s Resignation Offer. He Was Fired Anyway.
Scott Curtis had a leadership role in a critical agency until being kicked “to the curb” by Trump and Musk. Only after this article was published was he rehired.
[Update (February 21, 2025, 1:15 p.m. EST): Four hours after this article was published, and the accompanying video went online, Scott Curtis received an email from FEMA’s Office of the Chief Human Capital Officer telling him his firing was being reversed.
Curtis forwarded to The Bulwark the email he received, in which the officer said that “upon further review” of his file, they had “identified that you elected to participate in the Deferred Resignation Program (DRP).”
“As a result of this discovery, FEMA would like to offer you the opportunity to participate in the DRP,” the email read.
The email is at odds with the termination notice Curtis received earlier this week in which the acting administrator of FEMA Region 7 said he did not qualify for Elon Musk’s resignation program precisely because he was a probationary employee. Curtis, who is going back into the DRP, said he suspected the reversal was “a direct result of the visibility” brought by The Bulwark’s coverage of his story. If true, it would not be the first time a botched, rushed DOGE-commanded firing was unwound after sudden media attention.
Read the original story below.]
A TOP-RANKING REGIONAL FEMA OFFICIAL who took Elon Musk’s resignation deal was fired thirteen days later by the Trump administration, raising questions about the integrity of the program that the White House put together to off-ramp tens of thousands of federal employees.
Scott Curtis, a retired Navy captain, had served as the chief of staff at FEMA Region 7, which encompasses Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, and Nebraska. Like most other federal workers, he received the infamous “Fork in the Road” email that Musk’s DOGE operation sent out through the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) on January 28, offering him the chance to resign from his post while retaining “all pay and benefits regardless of your daily workload” and an exemption from “in-person work requirements” through the end of September. Recipients were given until February 6 to accept the offer.
Despite some skepticism, Curtis concluded that as a 55-year-old, retired military officer with a pension—and experience as an engineer with a specialization in aircraft carrier nuclear power systems—he had future prospects. So on the morning of February 4, two days before the deadline, he replied to the Fork in the Road email in the manner it prescribed, with a single word: “Resign.” The next day he received a terse reply from the hr@opm.gov account acknowledging receipt: “We received your email response. We will reply shortly.” (Curtis provided copies of both emails to The Bulwark.)
But OPM did not reply shortly. In fact, it didn’t reply to Curtis at all, including after the deferred resignation program was temporarily paused by a federal judge and when it was subsequently allowed to resume.
Instead, this past Monday, the acting deputy regional administrator called Curtis to inform him that his job was being terminated. Despite having served 32 years in the Navy, Curtis had only recently joined FEMA—starting in July 2024—meaning he was still in a ”probationary” employment phase, during which he was easier to fire. He went to his office to collect his personal effects but was turned away. As of this writing, his belongings still have not reached him.
“The part that I think bothers me was it was almost like misinformation, you know, the callousness [with which] this was rolled out,” Curtis said in an interview. “They had four years to think about how to do this. And it really looks like they did it the night before the first email on the back of a napkin.”
He couldn’t help but compare his treatment as a civil servant to his previous career. “You spend as much time in the military as I did . . . taking care of your people is just fundamental to what you do. And this seemed to be the opposite of that. It was just, you know, ‘Hey, we’re going to just lock you out of the building when you come in to get your coffee mug and, you know, just kick you to the curb.’”
CURTIS’S STORY IS JUST THE LATEST to raise questions about the procedures Musk and his team have implemented in the frantic first month of the Trump administration. A tech entrepreneur known for disrupting industry, dispensing with staff, and gutting his companies, Musk has taken a similar approach to reducing the federal government. The main casualty so far has been tens of thousands of workers who have either lost their jobs or, as in Curtis’s case, been left feeling misled by the promises Musk made.
Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, offered a statement defending the mass firings in general. “President Trump and his administration are delivering on the American people’s mandate to eliminate wasteful spending and make federal agencies more efficient, which includes removing probationary employees who are not mission critical,” it read.
More direct answers for why Curtis was let go were contained in the termination messages he received from his bosses. A PDF memo signed by Cameron Hamilton, the civil servant who is performing the duties of FEMA administrator while there is no Senate-confirmed administrator, informed Curtis that “based on your performance . . . you have not demonstrated that your further employment at the Agency would be in the public interest.” This formulaic language was used in nearly identical letters firing “probationary” federal employees in many other agencies this week.
As for Curtis’s request to accept the resignation offer, an email he received from his immediate superior, the acting administrator of FEMA Region 7, stated: “If you elected to participate in the deferred resignation program, a determination was made that probationary employees are not eligible and will be terminated.”
When that “determination” was made—and by whom—is entirely unclear. No such restriction was mentioned in the original Fork in the Road email. In fact, the guidance in that email was quite broad when it came to eligibility, stating that deferred resignation would be “available to all full-time federal employees except for military personnel of the armed forces, employees of the U.S. Postal Service, those in positions related to immigration enforcement and national security, and those in any other positions specifically excluded by your employing agency.”
The January 28 email from OPM announcing the deferred resignation program shocked federal employees, who had been given no heads-up and who were left to decipher the merits and trustworthiness of the offer that had randomly appeared in their inbox. A federal judge temporarily extended the initial February 6 deadline for employees to opt in, but on February 12, the program was allowed to go forward. The White House has said about 75,000 employees took Musk’s offer—a figure reportedly well short of the initial expectations for the program, and much more in line with regular rates of attrition and retirement.
This week brought the mass firing of federal employees serving in probationary status, either because they have been in the civil service for a short period of time or because they recently switched roles. Other probationary employees who opted to sign up for the deferred resignation offer have found themselves, like Curtis, left in a state of uncertainty.
Half a dozen employees across several federal agencies told The Bulwark that they had heard—as one put it—“crickets” since signing up for deferred resignation. One employee at the National Institutes of Health shared a story similar to Curtis’s: He relayed that his name had been included on a list to be fired despite having taken Musk’s offer to work through the end of September. A veteran, he was on the list because he was a probationary employee (with one week remaining until he graduated from that status). He informed superiors at NIH that he had applied for deferred resignation and they intervened to stop his termination—although he remains far from confident that the messy saga is over.
“I am still EXTREMELY skeptical the entire deal will pay out as promised,” the employee wrote to The Bulwark. “My boss has zero guidance and said he wouldn’t even have known I was taking the offer if I hadn’t talked to him.”
WHILE THE NIH EMPLOYEE declined to speak on the record for fear of retribution, Curtis did not share this qualm—not just because he was now jobless but because he had previous experience taking public stands that placed him in the crosshairs of powerful government officials.
In October 2021, Curtis, then still on active duty in the Navy, served as the foreman of a jury on a war-crimes court considering the trial of Majid Khan, the al Qaeda operative who had agreed to deliver $50,000 to help facilitate a deadly 2003 hotel bombing in Indonesia. Khan, a legal U.S. resident, had been tortured by U.S. intelligence forces and held for fifteen years at Guantánamo Bay. In his role as foreman, Curtis wrote a damning letter criticizing the CIA’s torture and calling for clemency in the final sentencing. He went public with his letter, predicting it would not adversely impact his career.
And it didn’t. The first time Curtis was ever fired in his life was, instead, on Monday, one of many casualties of the DOGE cull.
“I’m not taking it personally because I know it wasn’t,” he said.
“The tragedy is, this is happening to a lot of good people that took their first job in the federal government,” he continued. “The stereotype of the government worker”—the familiar image of the lazy, bored, entitled paper-pushing bureaucrat—“is totally not applicable to these individuals: you know, really smart right out of college, you know, young families, and they’re going through the same circumstance. I think that’s where the tragedy lies.”
As for his own future, Curtis is putting out feelers. He’s even entertaining the idea of running for office himself though he imagines it might tear his “soul out.” One thing he’s unlikely to do is return to his FEMA job, even if it’s offered back.
“I don’t know who in their right mind would apply for a federal job right now,” he said. “And the federal government does real work. I mean, there’s a lot of stuff that I think the nation is going to find that isn’t happening.”