(AFP) – A US judge on Wednesday lifted his freeze on a buyout plan offered to federal workers, handing President Donald Trump a victory in his efforts to drastically slash the government workforce. US District Judge George O’Toole, who had temporarily paused the plan last week, lifted his restraining order on the mass buyout offer.
Labor unions representing federal employees had filed suit to block the scheme masterminded by billionaire Elon Musk to slash the size of the US government by encouraging federal workers to quit. In an email titled “Fork in the Road,” the more than two million US government employees were given an offer to leave with eight months’ pay or risk being fired in future culls. The White House says more than 65,000 federal employees have signed on to the buyout offer from the Office of Personnel Management.
O’Toole, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, said the unions lacked the standing to bring the suit and his court did not have jurisdiction over the matter. “The unions do not have the required direct stake in the Fork Directive, but are challenging a policy that affects others, specifically executive branch employees,” he said.
The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), which represents 800,000 federal workers and was among the unions that brought the suit, called the ruling “a setback in the fight for dignity and fairness for public servants.” “But it’s not the end of that fight,” AFGE national president Everett Kelley said in a statement. “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,” Kelley said.
Musk, the world’s richest person and Trump’s biggest donor, is in charge of a free-ranging entity called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) that aims to cut hundreds of billions of dollars in government spending. His plans have effectively shuttered some federal agencies, sent thousands of staff members home, and sparked legal battles across the country. Trump’s executive actions have been challenged in dozens of court cases, and the White House accused judges on Wednesday of “abusing their power” to block the president’s moves.
“The real constitutional crisis is taking place within our judicial branch, where district court judges in liberal districts across the country are abusing their power to unilaterally block President Trump’s basic executive authority,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said. The decisions have come from judges nominated by both Republican and Democratic presidents, including Trump himself during his first term. But Leavitt accused the judges of “acting as judicial activists rather than honest arbiters of the law.”
She asserted that “77 million Americans voted to elect this president, and each injunction is an abuse of the rule of law and an attempt to thwart the will of the people.” She later celebrated the lifted freeze, calling it “the first of many legal wins for the President.” Attorney General Pam Bondi, at her first press conference on Wednesday, described Musk as a “great man” and said “we are going to back up Elon Musk every way we can.”
Asked whether the Trump administration would seek to impeach federal judges, Bondi said “that’s not going to happen now.” “We’re going to look at everything,” she said. “We’re going to follow the law right now. We’re going to follow the process.” These are federal judges with lifetime appointments,” she noted, “but they will be struck down ultimately by the Supreme Court of the United States if the appellate courts don’t follow the law as well.”
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