WASHINGTON — A federal judge on Thursday temporarily blocked the Trump administration from implementing their federal employee buyout offer until at least Monday afternoon.
“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,” said U.S. District Judge George O’Toole Jr. “I believe that’s as far as I want to go today.”
Lawyers for the Department of Justice said they would notify all federal employees who is subject to the buyout.
The buyout offer, titled “Fork in the Road”, gave over two million federal employees a midnight deadline to accept the Trump administration’s “deferred resignation”. Four different unions representing 800,000 federal civil servants argued that the offer is against the law.
Lawyers for the Justice Department filed a response Thursday night and warned against any further delay of the buyout, telling the judge that extending the delay would have “remarkably disruptive and inequitable repercussions.”
“Upon his reelection to office, President Trump immediately set to work to transform the federal workforce,” the filing said. “Animating these and other critical reforms is the recognition that the federal workforce must be streamlined to be more efficient and to better serve the American people.”
“Extending the deadline for the acceptance of deferred resignation on its very last day will markedly disrupt the expectations of the federal workforce, inject tremendous uncertainty into a program that scores of federal employees have already availed themselves of, and hinder the Administration’s efforts to reform the federal workforce,” the lawsuit said.
O’Toole set the Thursday afternoon hearing to listen to arguments as requested by the four federal unions to issue a temporary restraining order that would pause Thursday’s deadline for the buyout and require the Office of Personnel Management to provide a legal basis for the offer.
At least 40,000 federal workers — which is nearly 2% of the civilian federal workforce — have already accepted the offer to leave 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.”
