Washington — A federal judge on Thursday temporarily blocked the Office of Personnel Management’s deadline for federal employees to accept the Trump administration’s “deferred resignation” offer.
U.S. District George O’Toole prevented the agency from implementing the program’s deadline during a brief hearing held hours before federal workers were required to notify OPM of whether they would accept or reject the offer to step away from their positions.
A Justice Department lawyer said OPM would provide notice to federal employees that the deadline is paused pending further legal proceedings.
The Office of Personnel Management sent out an email last week with the subject line “Fork in the Road” that offered the more than 2 million federal employees “deferred resignation.” Under the program, they could resign their positions and retain full pay and benefits until Sept 30. Federal workers who agreed to resign would also be exempt from in-person work requirements through September, the email stated.
Employees were given until Feb. 6 to accept or reject the offer.
For those who opted to keep their positions, the message from OPM noted that the Trump administration could not give “full assurance regarding the certainty of your position or agency.” It also noted that “the majority of federal agencies are likely to be downsized through restructurings, realignments, and reductions in force” as part of Mr. Trump’s efforts to reform the federal workforce.
In a list of “frequently asked questions,” the agency said workers who accept the proposed buyout would not be expected to work at their government job during the deferred resignation period and would be allowed to get a second job.
Roughly 40,000 federal workers — or about 2% of the government workforce — have accepted the deal, a source familiar with the matter told CBS News. But the White House expected that number to rise as the deadline to accept drew closer.
Days after OPM put forth its offer, a group of four unions that represent more than 800,000 federal employees sued the agency and its acting director, Charles Ezell, arguing the so-called Fork Directive, as the unions call it, violates federal law.
“If these employees leave or are forced out en masse, the country will suffer a dangerous one-two punch,” the unions said in their complaint. “First, the government will lose expertise in the complex fields and programs that Congress has, by statute, directed the Executive to faithfully implement. The government will have fewer qualified employees to execute the statutorily-required tasks that still remain. 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.”
They noted that funding for federal agencies is set to expire March 14, and there is no appropriation in place to cover the salaries of government workers after that date.
They asked the judge to block OPM from implementing the Feb. 6 deadline.
The subject line of the OPM email is the same as a 2022 email that billionaire Elon Musk sent to employees of Twitter, the social media platform he purchased that year and renamed X. The White House has said Musk is working in the Trump administration as a “special government employee” leading the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which the president established with the goal of cutting spending and restructuring federal agencies.
