Military Veteran Agrees To Deferred Resignation — DOGE Finds Way To Fire Him Anyway
(AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
A top-ranking FEMA official and 32-year military veteran who took DOGE’s deferred resignation deal ended up fired anyway—just days later—as questions persist about the integrity of the controversial federal employee off-ramp program orchestrated by the Trump administration.
Scott Curtis, a retired Navy captain and former chief of staff at FEMA Region 7, told The Bulwark’s Sam Stein he had accepted the “Fork in the Road” resignation offer sent by Musk’s DOGE operation via the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).
The email, which flooded federal workers’ inboxes on January 28, promised those who opted in they could resign while keeping their pay and benefits through September. Curtis followed the instructions exactly, responding “Resign” on February 4, two days before the deadline. He received an email acknowledging receipt. That was the last he heard from OPM.
Instead, on Monday, Curtis was abruptly fired. His office access was revoked, and his personal belongings have still not been returned.
The rationale for his firing was that he was still in his federal probationary period, having joined FEMA in July 2024. That detail wasn’t in the original resignation offer. But when Curtis followed up, FEMA Region 7’s acting administrator made it clear: probationary employees weren’t eligible.
“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,” Curtis told The Bulwark.
The White House is standing by DOGE. Speaking to The Bulwark, spokesperson Anna Kelly framed it as a necessary purge of government waste: “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.”
That efficiency argument is a hard sell to Curtis, who spent three decades in the Navy and had hoped to contribute his expertise in aircraft carrier nuclear systems to FEMA. Instead, he was locked out of the office when he tried to retrieve his coffee mug.
“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.”
The case mirrors one raised by Fox News host Jesse Watters on Wednesday, who made an on-air plea to the Trump administration to consider safeguarding military veterans from mass firings, after a veteran friend of his working at the Pentagon and also under probation was laid off. (Although it’s uncertain whether Watters’ friend agreed to resign.)
Still, cases like this add to a mounting pile of evidence that Musk’s restructuring of the federal government is chaotic at best and ruthless at worst. The mass cull has left federal employees confused, misled, or, in Curtis’s case, unemployed – even after trying to follow the administration’s own rules.
