By Steve Wishnia

A federal judge in Boston on February 10 continued his halt on the Trump administration’s scheme to slash the federal workforce by offering to pay workers through September if they quit by Feb. 6.

District Judge George A. O’Toole, responding to a lawsuit by public-sector unions, said he would continue the halt “until I respond to the issues presented” and rules on whether the scheme is legal or illegal.

The unions are the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), AFGE Local 3707, and the smaller National Association of Government Employees (NAGE), an SEIU affiliate. They call the scheme—dubbed the “Fork Directive” after “a fork in the road,” the subject line in the email that gave workers a nine-day deadline to take the buyout offer—“a clear ultimatum to a sweeping number of federal employees: Resign now or face the possibility of job loss without compensation in the near future.”

“We are pleased with the judge’s decision today,” AFSCME President Lee Saunders said in a statement. “We must continue to stop the purge of federal workers. They are heroes for everything they do for our communities. Together with AFGE and NAGE-SEIU, we will continue to move this case forward until federal workers receive the respect they deserve.”

The suit argues that the directive is illegal under two federal laws.

First, the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946, because the administration issued the directive without conducting any analysis of which agencies were likely to be most affected by resignations or considering the effects that dramatically reducing the size of the federal workforce would have on government services.

Second, the Antideficiency Act of 1870, because it obligates the government to pay workers who resigned for several months without Congress authorizing that spending. (The fine print in the directive notes that Congress has only appropriated funds through March 14.)

The administration’s clear goal, it declares, is to replace career federal employees with “ideologically aligned” individuals.

The unions are asking the court to issue a restraining order that would declare the Fork Directive illegal under the Administrative Procedure Act; prohibit the Office of Personnel Management and its acting director, Charles Ezell, from putting the directive into effect until they can provide “adequate legal justification” and “adequate legal assurance of its terms”; and for the defendants to inform all workers who received it that the deadline has been suspended until at least 60 days after OPM completes “the required consideration of the Directive’s legal basis, justifications, and funding.”

In the Feb. 10 hearing before Judge O’Toole, Justice Department attorney Eric Hamilton called the buyout plan a “humane off-ramp” for workers fearing layoffs. But Elena Goldstein, a lawyer for the unions, called it a “slap-dash” scheme that “failed to consider the continued functioning of government.”

The administration claims that 65,000 workers, about 3% of the federal workforce, have agreed to resign, but that has not been independently verified.

Red and blue states duel

A group of 22 Republican state attorney generals, headed by Austin Knudsen of Montana, argued in an amicus brief that because Article II of the Constitution says “executive Power shall be vested in a President,” Trump therefore has unrestricted “authority to supervise and remove federal employees,” and thus to offer them “voluntary deferred retirement.” They dismissed the unions’ argument that the directive violates federal law as “various unsupported and speculative reasons.”

“Plaintiffs seek to inject this Court into federal workforce decisions made by the President and his team,” they complain, after citing Trump v. United States, the July 2024 Supreme Court decision that the President could not be prosecuted for acts that were part of his official duties.

A group of Democratic attorney generals from 20 states and Washington, D.C., meanwhile, filed a brief arguing that the directive would revive the 19th-century “spoils system” and severely impair federal services such as disaster relief and the already badly understaffed Social Security Administration and veterans’ hospitals.

“It also forces our Nation’s public servants—many with decades of experience and a wealth of institutional knowledge—to make a choice of tremendous potential consequence with minimal, constantly shifting information, all with thinly veiled threats of possible termination,” they said.

The lawsuit is among a spate of litigation challenging the administration’s efforts to eliminate government agencies, lay off thousands of workers or put them on administrative leave, and void provisions in union contracts.

Trump, however, might ignore any court order. He and his personnel hatchet man, Elon Musk, selected the U.S. Agency for International Development as their first target for destruction, issuing orders to put thousands of workers on leave and give those working abroad 30 days to move back to the U.S. On February 7, a federal court blocked those orders. But when staffers showed up for work at its Washington headquarters on Monday, February 10, they were barred from entering the building.

“Article II allows me to do whatever I want,” Trump told ABC News interviewer George Stephanopoulos in 2019.

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