Resign or resist?

From the 18th century to the 21st

In early 1774 Benjamin Franklin was fired from his job as postmaster general of Britain’s North American colonies. King George III and his ministers had grown frustrated by the political turbulence in the colonies, and in the wake of the Boston Tea Party they took out their frustration on Franklin.

Franklin’s son William Franklin also held a government job, as royal governor of New Jersey. Benjamin Franklin thought the king and his men might go after William as part of a family punishment. Or that William might resign his post in protest of his father’s sacking.

Benjamin urged William not to resign. “Perhaps they may expect that your resentment of their treatment of me may induce you to resign, and save them the shame of depriving you whom they ought to promote,” Benjamin wrote to William. “But this I would not advise you to do. Let them take your place if they want it.” Under present circumstances it might not be worth William’s keeping. Yet the onus should be on the king and his henchmen for firing a loyal subordinate. Benjamin Franklin shared a principle he had fashioned for himself: “One may make something of an injury, nothing of a resignation.”

Millions of government employees in America today face the choice William Franklin confronted. Elon Musk, with Donald Trump’s approval, has offered monetary incentives to executive branch workers to resign. Recently government employees have been ordered to submit statements justifying their employment, with failure to do so interpreted as resignation. Thousands of workers have been fired, in the evident hope of motivating others to quit voluntarily.

The question for the workers is whether to make Musk and Trump’s task easy or hard. It’s less straightforward than Ben Franklin’s advice to William Franklin suggests – as the denouement of that advice reveals. William did not resign, nor was he ousted by his royal superiors. Instead he was fired by his New Jersey compatriots after a majority of them endorsed independence from Britain. William Franklin was deposed and then imprisoned as a traitor to New Jersey and the newly formed United States. Following a prisoner exchange, loyalist William Franklin sailed off to Britain, where he lived the rest of his life, estranged from his rebel father.

Ben Franklin realized he had misjudged his son. But he never disavowed his counsel about not resigning. Does Franklin’s principle apply in the present to federal employees? Can one make more of an injury than of a resignation?

More precisely, what can one make of an injury that could not be made of a resignation? And vice versa?

On the side of resignation is the severance pay, in effect, awarded to those employees who took Musk’s offer. Assuming Congress funds his promise to them, and the president doesn’t rescind the promise, they will have made the equivalent of several months’ pay, for not working. This is no small thing. It seems to have appealed particularly to workers who expected to leave government employ in the near future anyway. For them resignation delivers free money.

Also on the side of resignation, for some, is the moral satisfaction that comes from refusing to perform an act perceived as illegal or unethical. Several Justice Department lawyers refused to sign a Trump-ordered motion to dismiss pending charges of corruption against New York mayor Eric Adams. They resigned instead.

The resigners could have refused to sign and waited to be fired. Instead they followed the lead of two of their predecessors from the 1970s who refused to follow orders by Richard Nixon to fire the Watergate special prosecutor, and then resigned, in what came to be called the “Saturday Night Massacre.”

In these cases the resignations were much like firings, in that the resigners made clear why they were resigning and the ethical objections they had to the orders they were disobeying.

Even so, the resignations made life easier for the higher-ups whose actions they were protesting. Firings usually require explanations and paperwork. Sometimes they provide grounds for lawsuits. Resignations, being voluntary, preclude the lawsuits and often the paperwork.

This apparently is a large part of the thinking of Musk and Trump. The more resignations they get, the less friction there will be in accomplishing the cuts they intend in the federal workforce. Which is why many of those opposed to such cuts are, like Benjamin Franklin with William, urging federal employees not to resign. If administration officials have to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s for hundreds of thousands of workers, and fend off lawsuits from many of them, their slashing will be substantially slowed.

Timing will matter. Cutting government jobs entails cutting government services. Voters who value those services will object and perhaps translate their objections into votes against the party responsible – the Republicans. This poses a delicate question for Democrats. Should they fight the job-cutting or sit on the sidelines?

If the former, they risk being labeled obstructionist and letting Trump blame them for the troubles that befall the country during his term. Their resistance might hearten federal employees, but if it doesn’t save many jobs, they will be seen as ineffectual.

On the other hand, if they sit on the sidelines, they can make clear that the negative consequences of the cuts are the responsibility of the Republicans. Trump has been more popular out of office than in. The Democrats’ shrewdest strategy might be to give him enough rope to hang himself.

This might have profound implications. A popular Trump will be tempted to bulldoze the 22nd Amendment and finagle a third term. An unpopular Trump will be less likely to try.

It’s a tough call. Ben Franklin would have admitted as much.