Key points
- There are around 2.4m civilian federal workers: Pew
- A federal judge temporarily blocked Trump’s buyout offer
- More than 2m federal employees faced a midnight Thursday deadline
ISLAMABAD: Two administration officials told news outlets that more than 60,000 federal workers had accepted the “buyout” offer as of Thursday afternoon.
According to Reuters, more than 40,000 federal workers had accepted the offer on Wednesday evening.
According to Pew, as per government figures from November 2024, there are around 2.4 million civilian federal workers, not including the US Postal Service.
On Thursday, a federal judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration and DOGE head Elon Musk from implementing their “Fork in the Road” federal employee buyout offer until at least Monday afternoon.
US District Judge George O’Toole Jr set a Monday afternoon hearing to consider further blocking the so-called “Fork in the Road” offer.
“Fork Directive”
“I enjoined the defendants from taking any action to implement the so-called ‘Fork Directive’ pending the completion of briefing and oral argument on the issues,” said O’Toole. “I believe that’s as far as I want to go today.”
The judge described the brief hearing as a “table-setting session” just to schedule arguments for Monday afternoon. He did not say anything about the merits of the dispute over the buyout.
I enjoined the defendants from taking any action to implement the so-called ‘Fork Directive’ pending the completion of briefing and oral argument on the issues.” – US District Judge George O’Toole Jr
Lawyers for the Department of Justice said they would notify every federal employee who is subject to the buyout, according to ABC News.
More than two million federal employees had faced a midnight Thursday deadline to accept the Trump administration’s “deferred resignation” offer as O’Toole considered an eleventh-hour request to block the buyout from moving forward.
Unlawful offer
Four unions representing a combined 800,000 federal civil servants argued that the offer was unlawful, arbitrary, and would result in a “dangerous one-two punch” to the federal government.
In a Thursday evening filing following the judge’s ruling, lawyers for the Justice Department warned against any further delay of the buyout, telling the judge that extending the delay would have “remarkably disruptive and inequitable repercussions.”
The DOJ attorneys argued that the buyout is an important tool in Trump’s plan to reform the federal workforce.
“Upon his reelection to office, President Trump immediately set to work to transform the federal workforce,” the filing said. “Animating these and other critical reforms is the recognition that the federal workforce must be streamlined to be more efficient and to better serve the American people.”
Disrupting the expectations
“Extending the deadline for the acceptance of deferred resignation on its very last day will markedly disrupt the expectations of the federal workforce, inject tremendous uncertainty into a program that scores of federal employees have already availed themselves of, and hinder the Administration’s efforts to reform the federal workforce,” the lawsuit said.
The filing argued that the four unions who brought the case could not establish standing to bring the case that the Trump administration is breaking the law by implementing the buyout.
If the court issues an injunction, they argue that any relief should be limited to the employees represented by the unions, not the entire federal workforce.
Judge O’Toole set the Thursday afternoon hearing to consider a request by four federal unions to issue a temporary restraining order that would suspend Thursday’s deadline for the buyout and require the Office of Personnel Management to provide a legal basis for the unprecedented offer, which offered to continue to pay federal employees through September 30, 2025, provided that they resigned by Thursday at 11:59 p.m.
Losing expertise
“First, the government will lose expertise in the complex fields and programmes that Congress has, by statute, directed the Executive to faithfully implement,” the lawsuit said. “And second, when vacant positions become politicized, as this Administration seeks to do, partisanship is elevated over ability and truth, to the detriment of agency missions and the American people.”
The judge’s ruling comes as at least 40,000 federal workers, roughly 2 per cent of the civilian federal workforce, have already embraced the deferred resignation offer to leave the federal government since last week, ABC News has reported.
Without legal basis?
The four unions, including the American Federation of Government Employees, the National Association of Government Employees, and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, argue that the OPM violated the Administrative Procedure Act by failing to provide a legal basis for the buyout offer and leaving open the possibility that the government might not follow through with the buyout once federal employees agree to resign.
Moreover, the lawsuit added that the buyout’s promise of payments through September violates the law as the current appropriation for federal agencies expires in March.
The buyout offers, part of Elon Musk’s effort to minimise the size of government through the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, were sent out under the subject line “Fork in the Road” — the same language Musk used when he slashed jobs at Twitter after taking over that company in 2022.
Threat of job loss
“To leverage employees into accepting the offer and resigning, the Fork Directive threatens employees with eventual job loss if they refuse to resign,” the unions’ lawsuit said.
Overall, the lawsuit alleged that the OPM rushed the offer with a questionable legal basis, largely copying Elon Musk’s management style following his takeover of Twitter.
“OPM’s rapid adoption of Musk’s private-sector program confirms that the agency took very little time to consider the suitability of applying an approach used with questionable success in a single for-profit entity to the entirety of the federal workforce,” said the lawsuit.
