WASHINGTON — The remaining employees of the federal government were granted a paid day of rest Monday in observance of the executive office currently being used to eliminate their jobs, marking the first Presidents Day in recent memory where the holiday and the threat shared a single point of origin.
Federal buildings across the capital sat dark from sunrise, their lobbies undisturbed, their security desks empty, their badge readers awaiting the diminished swipe traffic of Tuesday morning. A laminated sign taped to the side entrance of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building announced the closure in cheerful Helvetica, as though the body it served had not spent the prior eleven months hollowing out the people reading it.
The Office of Personnel Management, which has spent the winter sending termination notices via a contractor whose servers crash on Fridays, observed the holiday by sending no termination notices, a gesture employees were instructed to receive as goodwill.
“It’s a nice break,” said a GSA procurement officer in Crystal City who asked not to be named because three colleagues at her pay grade were walked out last Thursday. “I’m using the day to update my résumé, call my mother, and refresh the email I’m not supposed to be refreshing. Tomorrow I find out if my desk is still there. That’s how I’m honoring Lincoln.”
The White House marked the occasion with a statement praising the legacy of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and “the strong leaders who built this country into what it is becoming again,” a sentence parsed by federal employees the way airline passengers parse the captain saying everything is fine.
Across the Mall, the Department of Education observed Presidents Day by being substantially smaller than it was on the last Presidents Day, a milestone the administration has chosen to interpret as efficiency rather than as the specific thing it is. Sources at the agency confirmed that the building itself was closed but added that this was, in a structural sense, becoming the agency’s normal posture.
Retailers seized the occasion. Mattress chains across the DMV advertised forty percent off, a discount roughly matching the headcount reduction at USAID, a coincidence one analyst at the Beacon Strategy Group called “either bleak or extremely well-targeted advertising, depending on how you came up.”
A former HUD analyst severed in January, reached at a Bethesda coffee shop where he now spends his weekdays, said he intended to observe the holiday the same way he observes every other day this year, which is by watching the news with the sound off and refusing to look at LinkedIn before noon.
By late afternoon, the White House had issued a second proclamation honoring “the dignity of public service,” delivered without apparent irony to a workforce that had, by then, mostly stopped expecting any.