Dive Brief:
- A federal judge on Wednesday dissolved the temporary restraining order placed on President Donald Trump’s deferred resignation offer to federal employees detailed in the Office of Personnel Management’s Jan. 28 “Fork in the Road” memo.
- Judge George O’Toole of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts wrote that the labor unions challenging the offer — also known as the “buyout” — lacked Article III standing because they are “not directly impacted” by it. O’Toole also said the court lacked jurisdiction to consider the plaintiffs’ claims and that aggrieved employees could instead bring claims through a statutory scheme created by Congress.
- In a press release, Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, one of the plaintiffs, said that AFGE was assessing next steps. “Today’s ruling is a setback in the fight for dignity and fairness for public servants,” Kelley said. “But it’s not the end of that fight.”
Dive Insight:
Trump’s offer is closed despite O’Toole’s initial decision to place an extended block on it, according to OPM’s website, which stated that resignations received after 7:20 p.m. EST would not be accepted.
Workers who accepted the offer would receive pay and benefits through Sept. 30, unless they choose to leave earlier, and would be exempt from Trump’s return-to-office executive order. In an email to HR Dive Thursday, a White House source confirmed that approximately 75,000 workers accepted deferred resignation; for context, according to data from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management’s FedScope, approximately 146,500 federal workers retire or quit every year.
OPM said last month that the administration intended for 5-10% of eligible federal workers to accept in an effort to save some $100 billion in costs.
In his decision, O’Toole wrote that the unions did not have a required direct stake in OPM’s directive, but that they were instead allegedly subjected to “upstream effects including a diversion of resources to answer members’ questions about the directive, a potential loss of membership, and possible reputational harm.” But a loss of membership is not a certainty before the Sept. 30 effective date of the resignations, and “plaintiffs cannot manufacture standing through self-inflicted harms,” O’Toole said.
Kelley said that the decision “did not address the underlying lawfulness of the program” and that AFGE would “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.”
Another group of federal employee unions led by the National Treasury Employees Union filed a complaint against Trump on Thursday in the U.S. District Court for District of Columbia. Whereas the Massachusetts lawsuit claimed that Trump’s offer was arbitrary and capricious in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act, the D.C. district court complaint alleged that the buyout undermined congressional authority and violated the APA.
