A federal judge extended a temporary block on the Trump administration’s buyout offer to federal employees after a Monday hearing on the case.
Judge George A. O’Toole Jr. said he was keeping the injunction in place while he considered the legality of the deferred resignation offer and weighed the arguments in the case. He said the pause will remain on hold until he issues a new order. It is unclear when that might happen.
The original deadline was Thursday, February 6, but he put the pause in place just hours before the Thursday deadline. In response, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) announced that the new deadline for the offer was moved to 11:59 PM EST on Monday, February 10.
OPM is still accepting resignations from federal employees in the meantime. It posted the following notice on its website in response to the judge’s decision:
In compliance with an order issued today by the District Court of Massachusetts granting a request to stay the deadline for the Deferred Resignation Program, the program remains open to resignations. OPM intends to close the program to new entrants as soon as legally permissible.
The ongoing court proceedings are in response to a case brought by a group of federal employee unions who filed a lawsuit seeking to have the deadline extended. The case sought 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,” as a press release from AFGE described it.
As of this past weekend, approximately 65,000 federal employees had accepted the deferred resignation offer, according to CBS News.
