BOSTON—A coalition of unions, led by the Government Employees (AFGE) has apparently lost its bid to halt the Republican Donald Trump regime’s “buyout” ultimatum aimed at 2.4 million federal workers.
U.S. District Judge George O’Toole in Boston lifted the temporary pause he had imposed since Trump, acting at the behest of his handler, multibillionaire Elon Musk, unveiled the “take it or leave it” buyout plan of eight months’ severance pay, the week before.
Judge O’Toole threw the unions’ case out by ruling they did not have legal “standing” to directly sue for damages, since they were allegedly not individually harmed. His decision angered AFGE President Everett Kelley, whose union—the largest for federal workers—took the lead in the case.
Trump’s Office of Personnel Management chortled with glee when the decision came down from O’Toole, and set a new—and immediate—deadline of 7 p.m. Eastern Time on February 12 for workers to sign up to quit at the end of February, but still get paid through September 30.
“OPM is pleased the court rejected a desperate effort to strike down the Deferred Resignation Program. As of 7 p.m. tonight, the program is now closed,” the agency declared. “There is no longer any doubt: the Deferred Resignation Program was both legal and a valuable option for federal employees.”
Estimates are between 40,000 and 60,000 already have, despite the vagueness of the buyout terms, and despite the fact that if Congress doesn’t approve a new government-wide spending bill by March 14, the buyout recipients will join other federal workers on the no-pay line.
Claims “no standing”
“The unions do not have the required direct stake in” OPM’s “Fork In the Road Directive, but are challenging a policy that affects others, specifically executive branch employees. This is not sufficient,” O’Toole wrote.
That directive precisely mimics the language Trump’s handler, Elon Musk, used when he fired most of the workers he inherited when he bought Twitter, renaming it X.
“Today’s ruling is a setback in the fight for dignity and fairness for public servants,” AFGE President Everett Kelley replied in a statement. “But it’s not the end of that fight. AFGE’s lawyers are evaluating the decision and assessing next steps. Importantly, this decision did not address the underlying lawfulness of the program.”
“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.”
AFGE and other federal worker unions, including those who joined the larger union’s lawsuit, have cautioned workers not to accept the Trump buyout offer.
They said its constantly changing promises leave unclear if workers who take the buyouts will be free to seek outside jobs, for example.
In their suit against Trump’s “quit or take your chances” scheme on being fired, the union’s called his personnel office’s decision a massive “arbitrary and capricious” federal buyout plan to get rid of almost two million workers and replace them with Trump political hacks, just as in the spoils system of the Gilded Age.
That’s also a key goal of the criminal corporate class backing Trump’s firing plan—which extended to a February 12 Trump order mandating huge “reductions in force,” governmentese for cashiering workers, thus increasing profits.
The corporate class prefers untrained, neophyte and subservient Trumpites to career civil servants who know what crimes to seek out and punish. Trump’s rookies, ideologues and charlatans don’t.
The firings are also a long-time goal of the radical right, and part of Trump’s planned constitutional coup d’etat, a goal of the felonious president and his worker-hating puppeteer, multibillionaire Elon Musk.
Left unsaid is that success by the Trump regime would also completely disrupt the lives of more than two million federal workers and their families. That’s not counting some 40,000-60,000 who accepted a prior Trump voluntary “buyout” offer before its deadline of February 6.
“AFGE is bringing this suit with our partners today to protect the integrity of the government and prevent union members from being tricked into resigning from the federal service,” said Kelley.
“Shouldn’t be misled”
“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”—the buyout plan—”is unfunded, unlawful, and comes with no guarantees. We won’t stand by and let our members become the victims of this con.”
AFSCME joined the suit “to stop the purge of qualified professionals from the federal government workforce. Not only are these actions illegal and a scam, but they are eroding the health and well-being of our communities,” union President Lee Saunders said.
“These workers do everything from making sure families receive their Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security benefits on time to protecting our drinking water and the food we eat to overseeing our national security. If this chaos goes unchecked, it will have devastating impacts on working people.”
National Association of Government Employees President David Holway said “The ‘Fork Directive’ is a blatant attempt to undermine the merit-based foundation of our civil service. NAGE will not allow our members to be intimidated into making hasty decisions based on misleading information.
“The administration must be held accountable for this unlawful directive, and we are committed to protecting the rights and jobs of our members. NAGE stands firmly against any effort to replace qualified professionals with partisan loyalists at the expense of the American people.”
The buyout, Trump regime officials said, would pay the workers through the end of this fiscal year on September 30, with benefits. But the suit notes there’s no guarantee of that. Federal funding runs only through March 14, it notes. And a federal law, the Anti-Deficiency Act, bans paying workers after that if there are no funds available.
The forced buyout is only the latest Trump move, but the most drastic, in a series he, Musk and the right-wing Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 envision to downsize the federal government and remake it in their ideological image.
Prior moves included converting 50,000 top positions to a Gilded Age-like spoils system, a spending freeze, a hiring freeze, elimination of diversity, equity and inclusion offices and elimination of civil rights protections.
Trump also fired 17 independent inspectors general and completely shut down, on February 3, of one agency, USAID, locking out its workers, and lawmakers who came to inquire and protest. Some workers, including top non-partisan administrators, were forcibly evicted.
Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency chief also is telling his workers he plans to fire 1000 of them and Trump plans to eliminate the entire Department of Education, too.
“The continued success of government is based, in large part, on the institutional memory of its career civil servants who are committed to the missions of their agencies and the prospect of working for the American people,” the four unions said.
They are experts
“These civil servants are professionals and subject matter experts, many of whom have worked diligently and impartially through successive administrations of both major parties to implement changing administration priorities. If these employees leave or are forced out en masse, the country will suffer a dangerous one-two punch.”
Besides losing expertise, there will be fewer workers left to manage all the programs Congress enacted, the suit notes.
“And 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.
“That is why Congress, since 1883, has established rights and processes for protecting these employees from undue political influence and has granted employees who have completed a probationary period, or prior applicable service, protections from termination.
“The administration, in its first two weeks, has purported to wipe away longstanding civil service protections and merit system principles mandated by Congress, with strokes of a pen.”
Those “strokes of a pen” overriding congressional decisions on spending and priorities, are another part of Trump’s coup attempt this time. The Constitution says the president “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” It does not give the president any power to unilaterally override them.
“Daily, the president is eliminating offices and programs supported by appropriations and tasked by Congress with specific functions,” the suit says. “To leverage employees into accepting the offer and resigning, the Fork Directive threatens employees with eventual job loss in the event they refuse.”
“OPM stated ‘the majority of federal agencies are likely to be downsized through restructurings, realignments, reductions in force,’” it notes. That was Trump’s follow-up executive order on February 11.
Or, as longtime right-winger Grover Norquist put it in 2001, “My goal is to cut government in half in 25 years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”
The demand for the injunction did not discuss whether Trump may defy it, as Vice President JD Vance has since threatened.
Not only are civil servants a favorite Republican punching bag, but the party created and implanted an image with the people at large that federal workers are overpaid, lazy and shiftless time-servers. But opinion polls show 90% of the public back a non-partisan, non-politicized civil service.
The entire sequence of memo, deadline and firing threat is “contrary to law” and to “reasoned practices of government restructuring, and ignores history and practices around effective workforce reduction,” the lawsuit declared. It’s a “pretext for removing and replacing government workers on an ideological basis.”
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