(BOSTON) — A federal judge in Boston said Monday he will continue to pause the Trump administration’s plan to offer a deferred resignation buyout to tens of thousands of federal employees until he issues a ruling on a preliminary injunction.
Three federal employee unions — with the support of 20 Democratic attorneys general — have argued that the Office of Personnel Management’s deferred resignation offer is an “unlawful ultimatum” to force the resignation of government workers under the “threat of mass termination.”
The pause, ordered by U.S. District Judge George A. O’Toole Jr., came just hours ahead of the program’s midnight deadline, which itself was extended by four days following a temporary restraining order that continues to remain in effect.
During an hour-long hearing Monday, a lawyer for the Department of Justice framed the deferred resignation offer as a “humane off-ramp” for federal employees before President Donald Trump enacts sweeping changes to “rebalance and reorganize the federal workforce.”
“President Trump campaigned on a promise to reform the federal workforce,” DOJ attorney Eric Hamilton said, outlining Trump’s plan to reduce the size of the federal government and his return-to-office executive order. “We understand these announcements may have come as a disappointment for some in the federal workforce.”
Hamilton argued that any further delay of the buyout would cause irreparable harm because the Trump administration plans to enact the next steps of reshaping the federal government as soon as the buyout window closes.
Elena Goldstein, a lawyer representing the unions that brought the challenge, hammered the Trump administration for attempting to enforce an “unprecedented program” with a “slapdash exploding deadline”
“For the last two weeks, confusion has rained for millions of career civil servants,” Goldstein said. “This is a program of unprecedented magnitude that raises questions about the rationality of OPM’s decision-making.”
The buyout offer, part of Trump’s effort to trim the size of government through billionaire Elon Musk’s newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, was sent out two weeks ago in an email with 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.
The offer, from the Office of Personnel Management, offered full pay and benefits until September for any federal employee who accepted a deferred resignation by Feb. 6, with no obligation to work after they accepted the agreement.
While Goldstein acknowledged that Trump has the right to downsize the federal government, she emphasized that OPM has not gone through any of the steps necessary to carry out such a sweeping move — including analyzing the cost and benefits of their approach, evaluating its impact on the government’s function, and accessing potential conflicts of interest for Musk. She added that the exact terms of the buyout are “shifting” for thousands of employees who have gotten inconsistent guidance from their agency.
“OPM appears to be making this up as they are going along,” she said. “When the government wants to decide, there are ways to do this correctly … none of that happened here in the two weeks since they enacted this program.”
Arguing for the government, Hamilton criticized the plaintiffs’ argument as “legally incoherent and at odds with their theory of the case,” because a further delay of the buyout would “insert more uncertainty” into the lives of federal employees.
While the plaintiffs raised concerns that the buyout program violates federal law by using money that Congress never appropriated, Hamilton attempted to push back on the claim that the buyout changes the government’s financial obligations.
“Nothing about the voluntary resignation changes anything about the federal government’s financial obligations. It just changes what employees are expected to do and not do during their period of employment,” Hamilton said.
Goldstein argued that a preliminary injunction is necessary to prevent what she said was an unlawful offer to reshape the federal government while the Trump administration continues to “put additional pressure on employees.”
“This is an unprecedented action taken on an unprecedented timeline,” she said.
Just hours ahead of Thursday’s original deadline for employees to accept the offer, Judge O’Toole — who was nominated to the bench by President Bill Clinton — temporarily blocked the offer until Monday so he could consider issuing a temporary restraining offer pausing the order.
“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,” Judge O’Toole said in his ruling. “I believe that’s as far as I want to go today.”
The Trump administration, in response, “extended” the deadline for the offer, which more than 65,000 federal employees have already taken.
“We are grateful to the judge for extending the deadline so more federal workers who refuse to show up to the office can take the Administration up on this very generous, once-in-a-lifetime offer,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said last week.
The unions who brought the lawsuit argued that Trump exceeded his authority as president with the offer, which they described as a “slapdash resignation program.”
According to the plaintiffs, Trump’s offer violates federal law, lacks congressionally appropriated funding, and does not offer employees reassurance that the president would follow through with the offer. Their claim in part relies on a federal law from the 1940s called the Administrative Procedure Act that governs how federal agencies create and enforce rules.
“In the tech universe, ‘move fast and break things’ is a fine motto in part because they’re not playing with the public’s money, and it’s expected that most initiatives are going to fail,” Loyola Marymount law professor Justin Leavitt told ABC News. “Congress knows that, so in 1946 they basically said, ‘When agencies do stuff … they have to be careful about it. They’ve got to consider all aspects of the problem.”
The plaintiffs also argued that the buyout is unlawful because it relies on funding that Congress has yet to appropriate, violating the Antideficiency Act.
“Defendants’ ultimatum divides federal workers into two groups: (1) those who submit their resignations to OPM for a promised period of pay without the requirement to work, and (2) those who have not and are therefore subject to threat of mass termination,” the lawsuit said.
Lawyers for the federal government have pushed back on those claims, arguing that Trump has the legal authority to provide the buyout for employees within the federal branch, and that any further delay would do more harm than good.
“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,” DOJ attorney Joshua E. Gardner wrote in a filing last week.
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