Federal workers have a new response to the Trump administration’s “Fork in the Road” push to convince them to resign: spoons. During a meeting with a former Tesla engineer Wednesday, employees at the General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Services office “rained down spoon emojis in the chat that accompanied the video meeting,” the New York Times reports, adding, “Some employees also added spoon emojis to their statuses on Slack, a workplace communication app.”
To Rachel Maddow, the spoons are a “fork you” to the administration’s plans to drastically slim the federal workforce.
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About 40,000 people have accepted the offer so far. That’s short of what Elon Musk and his “Department of Government Efficiency” had hoped for, the Washington Post reports.
The idea of spoons as a symbol of defiance goes back further than Wednesday. An email that went out to all employees at the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was titled “A Spoon is Better Than a Fork,” according to a post on r/fednews, a Subreddit for federal workers. Another post proposes handing out spoons to colleagues. The same post calls Thursday “‘Hold the Line’ Day,” a reference to a phrase that some feds who don’t like the buyout offer have been using.
Andrew Beaujon joined Washingtonian in late 2014. He was previously with the Poynter Institute, TBD.com, and Washington City Paper. He lives in Del Ray.
