Dive Brief:
- As a Feb. 6 deadline looms for federal workers to decide whether to take deferred resignations offered by the Trump administration, a handful of federal workers’ unions filed a lawsuit Tuesday in federal district court requesting a temporary restraining order to halt the Fork in the Road directive.
- The unions — the American Federation of Government Employees; AFGE Local 3707; the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees; and the National Association of Government Employees — want the court to “require the government to articulate a policy that is lawful, rather than an arbitrary, unlawful, short-fused ultimatum which workers may not be able to enforce,” according to a news release issued by the unions.
- The lawsuit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts against the U.S. Office of Personnel Management and its acting director, Charles Ezell, alleges that the directive is “arbitrary and capricious,” in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act, and exceeds statutory authority under the Antideficiency Act. OPM and the U.S. Department of Justice did not choose to comment.
Dive Insight:
AFGE National President Everett Kelley said the unions do not want workers to be “tricked into resigning from the federal service.”
“Federal employees shouldn’t be misled by slick talk from unelected billionaires and their lackeys. Despite claims made to the contrary, this deferred resignation scheme is unfunded, unlawful, and comes with no guarantees. We won’t stand by and let our members become the victims of this con,” Kelley said in the union’s news release.
The Trump administration made the deferred resignation offer on Jan. 28, according to an OPM memo. Workers allegedly will receive pay and benefits through Sept. 30 and will be exempted from return-to-work mandates, the memo said.
However, workers who don’t resign before Feb. 6 are not ensured that their position or agency will not be eliminated, per OPM.
The memo follows Jan. 20 executive orders directing federal agencies to eliminate remote work, which unions are challenging separately. “Union contracts are enforceable by law, and the president does not have the authority to make unilateral changes to those agreements,” Everett Kelley, AFGE national president, said in a separate news release.
An OPM spokesperson previously told HR Dive that the administration expects 5%-10% of federal employees to accept the buyout offer, amounting to $100 billion in savings. So far, an estimated 20,000 workers have reportedly done so, per Axios — about 1% of the federal government.
