Judge halts Trump’s worker buyout offer after lawsuit from federal unions
A federal judge pumped the breaks Thursday on President Trump’s buyout offer for federal workers mere hours before the midnight deadline to apply.
Boston US District Judge George O’Toole Jr. set a hearing on the matter for Monday and suspended the midnight deadline without opining on the legality of 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. I believe that’s as far as I want to go today,” O’Toole wrote.
Last week, the Trump administration began offering federal workers a sweeping buyout, in which they could reap eight months’ pay and benefits in exchange for their resignation.
Three major unions, including the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees; the American Federation of Government Employees; and the National Association of Government Employees brought forward a suit against the buyout.
They argued that the Trump administration’s Office of Personnel Management infringed upon the Administrative Procedure Act, which sets the parameters for how government agencies can set regulations, by failing to provide a legal justification for the move.
The three unions, which represent some 800,000 workers, alleged that the Trump administration has left federal workers hanging due to the risk of employees accepting an offer which would later be ruled unconstitutional by the courts.
“OPM’s rapid adoption of [Elon] 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,” the lawsuit argued.
Trump, 78, and his team reportedly set a goal of 5% to 10% of the federal workforce accepting the offer, which they believe could save around $100 billion.
The federal attrition rate for employees hovers around 6% annually.
The buyout offer is believed to extend to at least 2.3 million federal employees.
Over 40,000 federal employees — about 2% of the federal workforce — are believed to have taken the buyout as of late Wednesday, though it was unclear how many of these planned to step down over the next eight months regardless.
“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 American Federation of Government Employees, the largest union of federal workers in the country, said in a statement.
“We continue to believe this program violates the law, and we will continue to aggressively defend our members’ rights.”
