Judge delays program offering federal workers incentives to quit

WASHINGTON — A federal judge in Massachusetts barred the Trump administration Thursday from imposing a midnight deadline on federal workers who were offered the chance to take a deferred resignation, pausing the initiative until a hearing Monday afternoon.

The offer, which had been set to expire at 11:59 p.m. Thursday, is part of a sweeping effort by President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk to drastically cut the size of the federal government.

Judge George O’Toole Jr., a U.S. District Court judge in the District of Massachusetts, stopped the Office of Personnel Management from moving forward with the program until Monday.

The “Fork in the Road” plan, which had been detailed in an email sent to roughly 2 million federal employees last week, offered workers the chance to resign and be paid through the end of September. Labor unions had challenged the legality of the program and urged employees not to accept the offer ahead of Thursday’s deadline.

“I enjoin the defendants from taking action to implement the so-called Fork directive, pending the completion of briefing and oral argument on the issues,” the judge said.

The decision was the latest legal setback for Trump, who also has two broad injunctions barring his end to birthright citizenship nationwide. In addition, two federal judges temporarily blocked the Trump administration from imposing a freeze on trillions of dollars in federal grants and loans.

It remains unclear how the decision will affect tens of thousands of federal employees who had already signed up to resign through the program. O’Toole instructed lawyers representing the government to rapidly contact all employees who had received the offer, letting them know that the program was paused.

The Office of Personnel Management, the federal government’s human resources agency, said the deadline was extended but the program was not canceled.

“In compliance with the court order, the deadline for federal employees to accept the deferred resignation program is being extended to Monday, February 10, at 11:59pmET,” the agency wrote in a post on social media. “The program is NOT being blocked or canceled. The government will honor the deferred resignation offer.”

More than 40,000 federal workers have accepted the offer, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Thursday as the judge’s ruling was being issued. She said the number was expected to increase. “We encourage federal workers in this city to accept the very generous offer,” she said, adding, “We’ll find highly competent individuals who want to fill these roles.”

Three government unions — the American Federation of Government Employees; the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees; and the National Association of Government Employees — and the liberal nonprofit group Democracy Forward had sued to block the deferred resignation plan, which they called legally unsound.

The unions argued that the offer was unlawful in part because the government could not promise to pay workers when Congress has not yet appropriated the funds to compensate them through September.

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

Terms of the offer, including draft resignation agreements, were distributed to employees throughout an array of agencies this week. Staff across the Education and Labor departments were briefed earlier in the week about the buyout. And employees in the CIA who were previously exempted, along with other national-security-related agencies, were also told Tuesday that they had become eligible to participate.

But the vague conditions and uncertain legality of the offer also led to considerable consternation as employees struggled to understand what protections it actually afforded.

Employees at the Education Department were told explicitly Wednesday that even if they accepted the agreement they were shown, they could still be fired Friday after having already waived any rights to sue or recover the seven months of salaries promised.

On Wednesday evening, the Social Security Administration’s human resources office emailed department employees a sample deal agreement, which included a stipulation that a lapse in federal appropriations — which would happen unless Congress agreed to a new spending deal by March 14 — would not affect the deal. But five paragraphs later, the agreement makes clear that the administration’s obligations “are subject to the availability of appropriations.”

In recent days, the Office of Personnel Management had issued memos saying that concerns about the program’s legality were “misplaced” and that separation agreements would be legally binding.

“Union leaders and politicians telling federal workers to reject this offer are doing them a serious disservice,” McLaurine Pinover, a spokesperson for the agency, said in a statement. “This is a rare, generous opportunity.”

Early Thursday morning, employees at various federal agencies received an email from the Office of Personnel Management reminding them about the impending deadline. “There will NOT be an extension of this program,” the email read.

Federal officials had intensified pressure on civil servants to take the deal, warning about the likelihood of staff reductions in the coming months as they stressed the legitimacy of the offer.

Earlier this week, top leaders at the General Services Administration urged employees to seriously weigh the offer. Michael Peters, the commissioner of the agency’s public buildings service division, warned in an email to his employees that the agency would be a “substantially smaller organization in the future.” In another email, Josh Gruenbaum, a former private equity director who oversees the agency’s federal acquisition service division, encouraged workers to “seriously consider the current offer.”

As the original deadline approached, some GSA workers made dark jokes about the incessant messaging from leadership. In one private Slack channel, someone shared a meme of a cartoon character receiving a message in a bottle on a deserted island that read: “You have until 11:59 EST to respond to the fork in the road and accept the deferred resignation offer.” Another worker cast doubt on some of the promises being made in the deferred resignation offer, sharing text of part of the supposed agreement with a meme of Marcia Brady from “The Brady Bunch” and the message “Nice try Jan.”

Musk has taken a particular interest in the General Services Administration, meeting with the agency’s acting administrator and deploying members of the Department of Government Efficiency to interview employees at the agency.

Hundreds of employees at other agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, who are working on probationary status or had been put on administrative leave for helping administer diversity programs, were told they could be fired imminently, causing many to weigh whether they would be best served by accepting the deal.

Some senior officials at other offices resigned before the deadline. Ted Carstensen, a deputy administrator for the U.S. Digital Service, announced in an email that he was stepping down from his role. The agency, which houses tech talent in government, was taken over by Musk’s team and renamed the “U.S. DOGE Service” on the day of Trump’s inauguration.

“I am not taking the fork, but after discussions with my family and other trusted advisers I decided that it’s time for me to pursue a different path,” Carstensen wrote in an email to his team, seen by The New York Times. “It was important to me to get the team to a place where everyone could choose their own path forward, which is where we find ourselves today.”

O’Toole told lawyers for both sides to prepare to argue the case on its merits Monday at 2 p.m., a hearing that could determine the program’s status.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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