Lessons on Reverse Psychology from the Trump Administration
How the Trump administration's Fork in the Road "buyout offer" to federal government employees backfired • Lessons learned and applied to change management
We usually avoid trendy stories, opting to write about timeless topics that were as relevant for our grandparents are they will be for our grandchildren1. This article is a rare exception because something extraordinary is happening in the federal government of the United States.
This is not a post about politics. It’s a real-world, real-time case study in effective vs. ineffective leadership. We’re watching and learning as events unfold, and we’re sharing our observations online in case it helps you practice better leadership too.
What Happened?
When President Trump took office on 1/20/2025, he issued a bunch of executive orders. One order effectively canceled work-from-home privileges for all federal workers within his control. Another froze hiring in most branches of the federal government. Other executive orders hit the “pause” button on spending, rulemaking, and other day-to-day governmental functions.
The r/fednews subreddit (a popular hangout spot for federal government employees) erupted in chaos. People swapped rumors, shared news stories, and commiserated in the face of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Many people stated their intention to leave the federal government and look for new jobs elsewhere, and other redditors echoed the sentiment.
One week later, on 1/28/2025, federal employees received an email from the Trump administration entitled Fork in the Road. Misleadingly called a “buyout offer” by the media, the Fork in the Road email invited federal employees to resign in exchange for continuing to work from home until the end of September 2025. Two days later, a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) email went out to supplement the original Fork in the Road.
After the Trump administration released the Fork in the Road, the tone in the r/fednews subreddit dramatically changed:
The atmosphere of despair morphed into an atmosphere of outrage.
Posts about fleeing the federal government have disappeared. In their place, there are posts to “hold the line!” “don’t resign!” and “fork off!”
The “every man for himself” mentality has given way to self-organized resistance.
In short: the Fork in the Road email backfired. Instead of convincing federal workers to resign, it created a cohesive resistance against resignation.
How Many Forks Does It Take to Remove a Lightbulb?
You might be scratching your head at this turn of events. Shouldn’t reducing morale encourage people to quit? The resignation offer from the Fork in the Road should sweeten the deal, shouldn’t it? Most organizations have trouble retaining staff, so why is the Trump administration having trouble firing unwanted staff?
Let’s start with the easiest answer first: most federal employees are not at-will employees. This is by design to protected federal employees from being fired at the whim of an incoming president. The Trump administration is trying to reclassify federal employees into at-will employees, but the administration must first unravel a Gordian Knot of existing laws and labor union contracts. Until they manage that, they’re trying to convince most federal employees to voluntarily quit.
Now let’s turn our attention to a pair of million-dollar questions:
Why is it so hard to retain at-will employees when you want them to stay?
Why is it so hard to get rid of protected employees when you want them to quit?
(Don’t) beware of the unintended consequences
Leadership Land is home to the Desert of Good Intentions, and the Desert is home to many varieties of unintended consequences. One species of unintended consequence is called psychological reactance: a spiteful, defiant reaction to a persuasion attempt that causes people to do the opposite of the request. When people feel cornered or boxed in, they’re more likely to engage in noncompliance or malicious compliance.
When you suggest the opposite of your intentions to get what you want, that’s called “reverse psychology.” When your message results in the opposite of what you intended, that’s called a “royal screw-up.” So far, efforts to convince federal employees to quit seem to be falling in the “royal screw-up” category.
Sad, Glad, Bad, Mad
In Contagious: Why Things Catch On, marketing professor Jonah Berger explains how some emotions encourage action, while other emotions stifle action. Emotions that cause increased heart rate, heightened tension, mental alertness, and readiness for action (what Berger calls “psychological arousal”) motivate us to act. Emotions that cause low psychological arousal do the opposite: they demotivate us.
How do these emotions motivate people to take action?
Quadrant 1 (Positive/high arousal): awe, excitement, and a sense of fun attract people from far and wide to your organization and increase employee retention. Employees who feel these emotions tend to be engaged and self-motivated.
Quadrant 2 (Positive/low arousal): contentment also increases employee retention. Or at least, it demotivates people from leaving because changing jobs/careers typically carries a high switching cost.
Quadrant 3 (Negative/high arousal): here’s where it gets interesting. Both anger and fear/anxiety cause people to share information and take action. Before the Fork in the Road email, fear was the dominant emotion in the r/fednews subreddit. People planned to flee the federal workforce. Then the Fork in the Road email replaced all that nervous energy with hot, seething anger. Exit plans gave way to defiance. Federal employees switched from “flight” to “fight.”
Quadrant 4 (Negative/low arousal): when people are sad, they withdraw. They retreat to a hidey-hole, curl up in a fetal position, and cry into an industrial-size container of ice cream. Like contented (glad) people, sad people feel low-energy and demotivated from doing much. Unlike contented people (who tend to stick around), sad people tend to drift away.
Fear/anxiety makes us flee. Sadness makes us drift. Outrage makes us fight. We’re getting closer to solving the dual mysteries of why it’s so hard to retain at-will employees and to get rid of protected employees.
Psychological warfare vs. open warfare
Many organizations preach excellence but produce mediocrity. Many people exaggerate the “innovation” and “novelty” of their uninspired work. Many leaders pay lip service to the value of their employees before laying off thousands in response to a bad quarter.
Weaponizing the Fog of Uncertainty is common practice in propaganda, statecraft, and psychological warfare. Before the Fork in the Road email, the r/fednews subreddit reacted to the weaponized Fog in various ways:
Many federal employees felt sad and helpless.
Many workers felt frightened and began preparing exit plans.
A significant minority felt angered by the Trump administration’s actions, but there was no unified call to action. They were psychologically aroused, but their excess energy was unfocused.
If the Trump administration had done nothing else, many people would have fled, drifted away, or eventually been culled. Then the Fork in the Road email came out and cured federal workers of aimlessness. One of the follow-up FAQs read (our emphasis):
[Question] Am I allowed to get a second job during the deferred resignation period?
[Answer] Absolutely! We encourage you to find a job in the private sector as soon as you would like to do so. The way to greater American prosperity is encouraging people to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector.
This message was tantamount to a declaration of war. The Fork in the Road was supposed to encourage federal employees to resign, but it insulted them instead. It enraged federal workers who were previously sad or fearful. It triggered psychological reactance en masse, inadvertently creating an organized resistance where none had existed before. The entire subreddit began to view the Trump administration as an occupying force and united around the rallying cries of “hold the line, don’t resign!” and “fork off!”
For the first week after the Trump administration took office, federal employees were scattered, scared, unfocused, and “every person for themselves.” By the end of week 2, the Fork in the Road had united them against a common enemy.
Oops.
Lessons Learned
You’ve been schooled on “change management” and “leading teams through change,” right? As bystanders to this drama, we are learning many valuable lessons to help us not be royal screw-ups.
To retain at-will employees, don’t desecrate the Temple of Trust
If you:
Tell people you care, but you demonstrate the opposite
Claim to innovate, but you’re doing the same thing and calling it something new
Preach excellence, but produce (or tolerate) mediocrity
You’re sowing fear, uncertainty, and doubt. You’re waging low-grade psychological warfare against your own people. You’re sabotaging your subordinates’ trust; see How to Build Trust (Hint: “More Teambuilding” Won't Work).
In Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture, and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. You’re the boss, and you’re telling Orwellian lies about how caring, innovative or excellent your organization is. Will your subordinates feel brave enough to call you out?
Probably not. Like the powerless protagonists in Orwell’s book, your employees are likely to keep their silence and be:
Sad, and produce only what you can drag out of them
Scared, and seek to defect somewhere else
Mad, and resist your requests (or worse: they comply maliciously)
To retain employees, you’d need something else to keep them feeling more rad (awestruck/excited/amused) or glad (contented) than sad, bad, or mad. And that’s very, very difficult (more on this later).
Higher arousal, higher productivity
If your employees are sad or glad (content), they probably won’t feel motivated to do much. Keeping your employees in a state of high psychological arousal (rad, mad, bad) is similar to keeping them caffeinated. A reasonable amount of excitement, fear about competitors, and anger directed at the right places can make your organization extremely productive.
That said, excessive arousal is dangerous, just like excessive caffeine makes you jittery. Overly-excited employees can waste a lot of energy on frivolous or dead-end pursuits. Excessive fear can disrupt focus. Anger can be misdirected at you instead of more productively at an external threat.
Never let a good crisis go to waste!
Fear/anxiety is a high-arousal emotion. If your organization is in the middle of a crisis, don’t try to deny or suppress the fear; learn how to channel your organization’s nervous energy into productive action.
If your employees are afraid of their management, they’re likely to flee as soon as they find greener pastures. But if your employees are afraid of an external threat (like a competitor or an invading force) they’re more likely to circle the wagons and work tirelessly to counteract a common enemy.
Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle and professional eccentric, famously believed that it’s always good to have an enemy. Ideally, the enemy would appear threatening enough to motivate employees, but not powerful enough to pose a serious threat. This sounds great in theory, but Ellison went out of his way to make enemies where none existed. Some of Oracle’s rivalries were bizarre and probably more distracting to employees than motivating.
Is it better to be loved or feared?
If you had to pick between rad (positive/high arousal) and mad/bad (negative/high arousal), which is better? In other words, is it better to be loved or feared?
In The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli wrote that it’s ideal to be both loved and feared. However, given that a prince is rarely both loved and feared, he would find greater security in being feared than loved. Machiavelli’s reasoning is that fear is more reliable of a motivator than capricious emotions such as love and affection. Many people who read The Prince in business school continue to apply that philosophy in today’s world.
We disagree.
It’s true that few modern organizations are both loved (rad) and feared (mad/bad) by its employees. But one major change since the 1500s is that people are more mobile today than they were in Machiavelli’s time. At-will employees can change jobs as easily as an employer can fire them. Your most valuable employees have more options, and thus more mobility. Plus, most societies have become less tolerant of wanton head-chopping since the days when the Italian peninsula was made up of belligerent city-states; ruling by fear and cruelty is less effective today.
Machiavelli remains correct in the sense that anger and fear (mad/bad) are more reliable motivators than awe and excitement (rad). Most organizations are kinda plain and boring, so only the sexiest ones (typically high-paying, high-prestige orgs with noble missions) have any hope of retaining employees by love alone. No matter where you work, ruling by fear will more reliably motivate your employees to leave than ruling by love can encourage them to stay.
Anger and psychological reactance
Don’t insult the people you want to influence.
Outrage triggers psychological reactance. If you want them to stay, they might leave just to spite you. If you want them to leave, they might stay just to spite you. You could try playing the reverse-psychology game on someone, but people tend to resent being manipulated. They’ll be more mad and more resistant the next time around.
The only reason to insult someone is to goad them into making a fool of themselves in public, or to bait a prideful opponent into an ambush. Resist the urge to put someone down for the sole purpose of making yourself feel smugly superior.
Smoke and mirrors
A shapeless, formless enemy sows fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Contrast that with an unconcealed enemy, whose very presence invites organized resistance.
If your organization is under threat from external forces, direct your people’s anger and fear at an enemy, no matter how symbolic. The clearer the aggressor appears in their minds, the stiffer the resistance.
Cool Story, Bro…But Is It True?
We’re armchair psychologists conducting an observational study through a computer screen. When working through new developments, our thinking is always coarse and sometimes flat-out wrong. Let’s turn our attention to all of the reasons our analysis might be incorrect:
Reddit represents the popular opinion, not the truth. Federal employees could be silently leaving in droves or accepting the Fork in the Road’s resignation offer. Even if federal workers wrote about taking the resignation offer on r/fednews, they might be downvoted for not “holding the line” or accused of being a suspected troll. Survivorship bias weighs heavily on our analysis.
The prevailing opinion in the r/fednews subreddit isn’t necessarily representative of all federal workers. The subreddit’s 305k members (many of whom aren’t even federal workers) comprises only ~10% of the U.S. federal government’s civilian workforce.
The subreddit’s “hold the line, don’t resign” resistance movement might’ve self-organized over time, even if the Trump administration had never sent the Fork in the Road email.
The Fork in the Road appears to be a tactical misstep, but the war is far from over. The Fork in the Road could be weaponized later as a justification for mass firings (AKA “reductions in force”). As in, “we offered them an olive branch and they spat in our faces, so now we can terminate them on less favorable terms.”
We observed that the Fork in the Road happened to coincide with the change from fear to anger, speculated that the Fork in the Road email caused the change, and tried to make sense of the developments by fitting a plausible-sounding psychological explanation to drive the story forward. In other words: we concocted a compelling narrative, but we have no idea if the narrative is true. That’s why observational studies are the weakest form of critical thinking, and it’s very important to fight confirmation bias by looking for disconfirmatory evidence (as we did above).
Our working hypothesis is that even if the Trump administration ultimately achieves its stated goal of hollowing out the federal government, it would’ve achieved its objectives more easily if it hadn’t enraged federal workers and inspired them into forming a cohesive resistance movement. We consider the “lessons learned” to be informative for change management in other organizations, but we may renounce our opinions later as events unfold. You should remain skeptical, too.
This spontaneous, unplanned post is not part of the Leadership Land Consistency Challenge, Phase I. We’ll return to Risk and Uncertainty in Leadership: 2-Dimensional Thinking next week.
That’s because we’re a small fish in a big pond; it’s unwise to compete with newspapers and the mainstream media for people’s attention when the Pareto Principle (80/20 Rule) heavily favors incumbents. We’re better off staying in our quirky little niche.