Judge halts Trump federal employee buyout offer

(CN) — A federal judge on Thursday halted President Donald Trump’s “Fork in the Road” federal buyout program from taking effect until at least Monday afternoon.

The buyout offer was being pushed by the Trump administration and Elon Musk, the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, as a way to drastically reduce the number of federal employees. More than 2 million federal employees have been offered the buyout, and had faced a deadline of Thursday at midnight to accept the administration’s “deferred registration” offer.

Roughly 40,000 employees, 2% of those who were offered the deal, had reportedly accepted the offer as of Thursday afternoon — short of the White House’s goal of cutting between 5% and 10% of the federal workforce through the program.

Ruling from the bench on Thursday, U.S. District Judge George O’Toole Jr. of the District of Massachusetts pushed the deadline back to next week so that oral arguments can take place on the buyouts’ legality before they are finalized by the Trump administration.

The Bill Clinton appointee set a hearing for Monday, where a trio of federal unions representing 800,000 federal workers will argue that the buyout offer is unlawful and dangerous to the government.

The unions — the American Federation of Government Employees, the National Association of Government Employees and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees — claim in a lawsuit filed this week that the Office of Personnel Management violated federal law by failing to provide a legal basis for the offer.

“If these employees leave or are forced out en masse, the country will suffer a dangerous one-two punch,” the unions say in their 41-page complaint. “First, the government will lose expertise in the complex fields and programs that Congress has, by statute, directed the executive to faithfully implement … 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.”

Trump is offering to continue to pay the employees who resign by the deadline until Sept. 30, 2025. But the unions claim there is no guarantee Trump will follow through with that promise, as Congress has “appropriated no funds for this purpose.”

Additionally, the unions argue the president rushed the federal employees — who were given just over a week to consider the offer — under threats of future layoffs.

“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,” they say in the lawsuit.

They likened the buyout offer to Musk’s 2022 takeover of Twitter, now X, when he slashed nearly 80% of the company’s workforce. In fact, the “Fork in the Road” name is identical to the subject line Musk used when announcing to employees that the mass layoffs were imminent.

“The ‘Fork in the Road’ approach at Twitter was widely regarded as chaotic, and the company’s value declined precipitously after it was implemented,” the unions claim, citing reports that found the site to have lost 72% of its value since Musk had purchased it.

The unions seek a preliminary injunction to keep the buyout from going into effect until the Office of Personnel Management can “provide adequate legal justification for the Fork Directive and adequate legal assurance of its terms.”

O’Toole will rule on the injunction request next week, following oral arguments on the matter.

The buyouts are one of several planks of Trump’s platform being scrutinized in court in the early days of his presidency. On Thursday, a federal judge blocked Trump’s controversial executive order limiting birthright citizenship — the second to do so thus far.

Earlier this week, FBI agents sued Trump over a directive from the Department of Justice to suss out agents that were involved in investigating Trump over the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection attempt.

Last week, a judge blocked Trump’s freeze on federal aid that risked devastating health research, education programs and other initiatives reliant on those funds to survive.

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