Judge Temporarily Halts Trump, Musk Federal Worker ‘Buyout’ (2)

A judge temporarily delayed the Feb. 6 deadline for millions of federal workers to decide whether to accept the Trump administration offer to resign with the promise of months of full pay, as a fight over the lawfulness of the buyout push goes forward.

US District Judge George O’Toole announced at a brief hearing Thursday that he would block the administration from implementing the offer until he holds another conference on Feb. 10 on a longer-term halt. O’Toole, who is in Boston, said that he was barring US officials from carrying out the directive to allow time for “proper consideration” of the issues.

Federal employees will receive formal notice of the judge’s order, a US Justice Department lawyer confirmed during the hearing. The judge didn’t hear arguments on the merits of the legal fight.

More than 50,000 employees, representing about 2% of the workforce, had signed up for the resignation offer ahead of the Feb. 6 deadline, according to a person familiar with the situation who wasn’t authorized to publicly discuss it. In the coming days, agencies will continue to process resignation notices submitted by workers eligible for the program, the person said.

Read More: Trump Buyout at 50,000 Takers as Focus Shifts to Poor Performers

A spokesperson for the Office of Personnel Management did not respond to a request for comment.

“We are pleased the court temporarily paused this deadline while arguments are heard about the legality of the deferred resignation program,” Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, one of the unions that sued, said in a statement. “We continue to believe this program violates the law, and we will continue to aggressively defend our members’ rights.”

Federal employees received the buyout offer Jan. 28 via an email titled “Fork in the Road,” echoing a similar memo that Elon Musk, the Tesla Inc. CEO who is leading the Department of Government Efficiency, sent to employees of the social media platform Twitter after he bought it and renamed it X. The message said US employees who took the offer wouldn’t be expected to continue performing their jobs and would keep their pay and benefits through September. It included language that the unions described as “barely-veiled threats” of being fired if they didn’t resign.

The unions contend that the administration caused “sheer chaos” by trying to import “Musk’s questionable private-sector business model to the federal government.” They argued the resignation offer was a pretext to clear out positions across federal agencies to refill with new hires “on an ideological basis.” They said that the directive was an illegally “arbitrary and capricious” move by OPM and promising pay that Congress hadn’t authorized in a budget past March.

The challengers argued that a temporary reprieve was needed because they would be “irreparably harmed by long-lasting impacts of the rushed and ill-informed choice the Fork Directive has foisted upon their members: as Plaintiffs expend resources that cannot be recovered trying to help their members make sense of OPM’s ever-shifting ultimatum, they are thwarted in counseling members for lack of consistent information, and they stand to lose members in significant numbers.”

(Updated with resignations, union president comment in the fourth paragraph.)

--With assistance from Gregory Korte.

To contact the reporter on this story:
Zoe Tillman in Washington at ztillman2@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Sara Forden at sforden@bloomberg.net

Elizabeth Wasserman

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