By Melissa Quinn
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 Judge 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 agency said that it is extending the deadline for federal employees to accept the deferred resignation offer to Monday at 11:59 p.m. ET in compliance with the court’s order.
“The program is not being blocked or canceled. The government will honor the deferred resignation offer,” OPM said.
Lee Saunders, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, one of the unions challenging the Trump administration’s program, said the decision is a “great first step.”
“We all depend on federal workers to keep our communities safe, healthy and strong, and politics should never get between them and the essential services they provide,” he said in a statement. “They deserve to be treated with respect for their public service. We look forward to presenting our full case in the days to come.”
The White House personnel office 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 previously had until Feb. 6 to accept or reject the offer. The program is not available to members of the military, U.S. Postal Service employees or those whose work is related to immigration and national security, according to OPM.
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” about the offer, 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, according to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. But the White House expects that number to rise.
Leavitt said in response to the order that the Trump administration is “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.”
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 from Congress 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 President Trump established with the goal of cutting spending and restructuring federal agencies.
The proposed buyout offered by the Trump administration has raised concerns from employment lawyers, as components of it are unclear and lack guarantees, several told CBS News. It’s also not clear the Trump administration has the authority to create such a program, as the unions have alleged in their legal challenge.
A dozen state attorneys general have also cautioned federal employees against accepting what they said is a “misleading” offer to resign.
The deferred resignation program is one of several initiatives undertaken Mr. Trump since he returned to the White House that aims to slash the size of the federal government. The president ordered millions of federal workers to return to the office full-time and directed agencies to end remote work arrangements.
His administration has also taken aim at the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, placing nearly all of its staff on leave and ordering its overseas missions to shut down.