Labor Department Brings Back Staff Who Took ‘Fork’ Offer (1)

Staffers who opted into the Trump administration’s deferred resignation program, voluntarily taking paid administrative leave with the expectation of leaving their jobs, are returning to the US Labor Department.

Three current DOL employees, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Bloomberg Law that colleagues who took the Department of Government Efficiency’s “Fork in the Road” offer earlier this year have returned as full-time workers, after collecting their full pay and benefits for months without performing their job duties.

The agency’s internal website for processing employee IT requests also has a banner reading “Welcoming Back Returning DRP Employees,” according to a screenshot shared with Bloomberg Law.

The reinstatements demonstrate the whiplash federal workers face when President Donald Trump’s directives to shrink the government collide with the demands of an agency’s day-to-day work. At least one other agency, the Internal Revenue Service, made similar decisions to claw back staff lost to the deferred resignation program.

The Labor Department is considering DRP rescissions for 100 positions that are “mission-critical roles,” agency spokesperson Courtney Parella said in an emailed statement. The reversal was necessary “to address critical mission needs while maintaining our goal of cutting bureaucratic waste and streamlining operations,” she said.

Parella didn’t provide further detail on the mission-critical positions. The department is charged with enforcing a broad range of workplace laws, collecting critical economic data, and funding billions of dollars of workforce investment and job training programs.

Roughly 2,700 of the DOL’s 14,578 employees agreed to voluntarily separate from the agency under the DRP earlier this year.

McLaurine Pinover, a spokeswoman for the Office of Personnel Management, declined to comment, saying individual agencies awarded deferred resignation in the first place, “and they can decide who is excepted from the hiring freeze.”

Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer in April pressed DOL staff to take advantage of the deferred resignation program offer, warning in an email that layoffs could be on the table if not enough employees left the agency voluntarily.

The deferred resignation program was meant to encourage workers to quit by offering to pay federal employees their regular salary and allow their benefits to accrue through September if they voluntarily resigned from their position. Those who opted into the program weren’t required to work during that period.