Judge declines to block Trump administration’s resignation offer to federal employees

After issuing two stays, U.S. District Judge George O’Toole has declined to block the Trump administration’s deferred resignation program for federal employees.

The ruling comes more than two weeks after the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) sent an email to more than 2 million civilian employees of the federal government with the subject line “Fork in the Road.”

The email presented government workers with a choice: They could resign now, in exchange for pay and benefits through the end of September, or they could remain in their positions, with the caveat that their jobs are not guaranteed.

Moreover, those who stayed would face “significant” reforms, including layoffs, a return to working in the office full time and an expectation that they be “loyal,” the email said.

The legal group Democracy Forward filed a lawsuit on Feb. 4 on behalf of labor unions representing more than 800,000 civil servants, alleging that the Trump administration’s resignation offer is unlawful, as well as “arbitrary and capricious in numerous respects.”

In his ruling, O’Toole wrote that the plaintiffs — the labor unions — lack standing to challenge the “Fork” directive, because they are not directly impacted by it.

“Instead, they allege that the directive subjects them to upstream effects including a diversion of resources to answer members’ questions about the directive, a potential loss of membership, and possible reputational harm,” O’Toole wrote in his decision. “This is not sufficient.”

O’Toole also stated that the court lacks subject-matter jurisdiction. Federal employees, he noted, are supposed to take their workplace complaints to the independent agencies set up to review personnel matters within the government.

Yet on Tuesday, attorneys for the unions asked O’Toole to consider that President Trump ousted the chair of the Federal Labor Relations Authority and a member of the Merit Systems Protection Board, two forums where claims brought by civil servants are reviewed.

“These terminations have now fundamentally weakened these entities and undermined their bipartisan composition, further impairing any purported opportunity for ‘meaningful judicial review,'” the attorneys wrote.

O’Toole did not rule on the legality of the deferred resignation program.

In a statement, Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, one of the plaintiffs, called the decision a setback but not the end of the fight.

“We continue to maintain it is illegal to force American citizens who have dedicated their careers to public service to make a decision, in a few short days, without adequate information, about whether to uproot their families and leave their careers for what amounts to an unfunded IOU from Elon Musk,” he wrote.

Wednesday’s ruling dissolves O’Toole’s stay on the “Fork” deadline, though it’s not clear whether a new deadline will be set. OPM did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

More than 65,000 federal employees, roughly 3% of the federal workforce, had agreed to resign as of Tuesday morning, according to a spokesperson at OPM.

Earlier this week, Trump said he was confident that his administration would prevail. 

“I got elected on making government better, more efficient and smaller, and that’s what we’re doing, and I think it was a very generous buyout actually,” he said, speaking in the Oval Office.

Have information you want to share about the “Fork in the Road” offer or ongoing changes across the federal government? Reach out to the author. Andrea Hsu is available through encrypted communications on Signal at andreahsu.08.