A buyout — also called a voluntary separation incentive payment or VSIP — is a cash payment to entice a federal employee to leave voluntarily. The maximum in most cases is $25,000 per person, although the payment is taxable, reducing its take-home value by several thousand dollars at least.

Employees accepting a buyout must leave by a specific date and can’t return to federal employment within five years unless they repaid the entire, pretax buyout amount. … Commonly, buyouts are paired with early retirement offers.

Voluntary Early Retirement Authority (VERA), in federal lingo, allows federal employees to retire before they hit the standard combinations of age and years of service. There are two main federal retirement systems, one called the Civil Service Retirement System and the other the Federal Employees Retirement System. The former generally applies to those first hired before 1984, now less than a tenth of the workforce — but that also means they are older and closer to retirement on average …

… Early retirement offers allow employees under either system to retire at age 50 with 20 years of service or any age with 25 years, potentially subject to a reduction in benefits.