A federal judge has temporarily blocked the Trump administration and DOGE head Elon Musk from implementing their “Fork in the Road” federal employee buyout offer until at least Monday afternoon.
U.S. District Judge George O’Toole Jr. set a Monday afternoon hearing to consider blocking the buyout offer further.
“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,” said O’Toole, who described the brief hearing as a “table setting session” just to schedule arguments for Monday afternoon. He did not say anything about the merits of the dispute over the buyout.
Lawyers for the Department of Justice said they would notify every federal employee who is subject to the buyout.
More than two million federal employees had faced a midnight Thursday deadline to accept the Trump administration’s “deferred resignation” offer as O’Toole considered an eleventh-hour request to block the buyout from moving forward.
The judge set the Thursday afternoon hearing to consider a request by three federal unions to issue a temporary restraining order that would suspend Thursday’s deadline for the buyout and require the Office of Personnel Management to provide a legal basis for the unprecedented offer, which offered to continue to pay federal employees through Sept. 30, 2025, if they resigned by Thursday at 11:59 p.m.
Three unions representing a combined 800,000 federal civil servants argued that the offer is unlawful, arbitrary, and would result in a “dangerous one-two punch” to the federal government.
“First, the government will lose expertise in the complex fields and programs that Congress has, by statute, directed the Executive to faithfully implement,” the lawsuit said. “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.”
The judge’s ruling’s comes as at least 40,000 federal workers — roughly 2% of the civilian federal workforce — have already accepted the deferred resignation offer to leave the federal government since last week, ABC News has reported.
The three unions — the American Federation of Government Employees, the National Association of Government Employees, and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees — argue that the OPM violated the Administrative Procedure Act by failing to provide a legal basis for the buyout offer and leaving open the possibility that the government might not follow through with the buyout once federal employees agree to resign.
The lawsuit added that the buyout’s promise of payments through September violates the law because the current appropriation for federal agencies expires in March. Moreover, the buyout is unfair because it was made alongside a threat of future layoffs, the lawsuit said.
The buyout offer, part of Elon Musk’s effort to trim the size of government through the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, was sent out under 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.
“To leverage employees into accepting the offer and resigning, the Fork Directive threatens employees with eventual job loss in the event that they refuse to resign,” the unions’ lawsuit said.
Overall, the lawsuit alleged that the OPM rushed the offer with a questionable legal basis, largely mimicking Elon Musk’s management style following his takeover of Twitter.
“OPM’s rapid adoption of 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,” said the lawsuit.
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