(The Center Square) – A federal judge on Thursday temporarily suspended a midnight deadline for the Trump administration’s deferred resignation program, which offered nearly all federal employees a buyout before a planned overhaul of the executive branch.
U.S. District Judge George O’Toole Jr. set a Monday afternoon hearing to consider blocking the buyout offer further after a federal employee union filed suit.
Last week, the White House gave federal workers a choice: return to the office or leave with eight months of pay. The Office of Personnel Management told federal workers that they have until midnight Feb. 6 to decide. Those who accept the offer – simply by replying “resign” to the email – will continue getting all pay and benefits and be exempt from in-person work requirements until Sept. 30.
Workers will now have until Monday to accept the deal, the judge said.
The American Federation of Government Employees, which represents about 800,000 federal works, praised the decision.
“We are pleased the court temporarily paused this deadline while arguments are heard about the legality of the deferred resignation program,” AFGE National President Everett Kelley said. “We continue to believe this program violates the law, and we will continue to aggressively defend our members’ rights.”
More than 40,000 federal employees plan to take the U.S. government up on a deferred resignation offer sent out last week. That could be an early indication Trump’s effort to trim the federal bureaucracy through voluntary measures could fall short of expectations.
OPM officials said the number of federal workers who have accepted the resignation offer was more than 40,000, according to a Wall Street Journal report. The Trump administration is expecting numbers to rapidly increase in the final day before the deadline, the Journal reported.
The federal deferred resignation offer, which is similar to a buyout, went out to more than 2 million federal employees, although not all employees were eligible to accept the offer, including some Internal Revenue Service employees as tax season approaches.
White House officials estimated that the in-office requirement will prompt 5% to 10% of federal employees to exit. The administration estimated it could lead to $100 billion in yearly savings, but did not provide information about how it reached that estimate.
The U.S. government employs about 2.4 million federal workers, excluding the military (about 1.3 million active-duty military personnel) and U.S. Postal Service (about 600,000 employees), according to 2024 Pew Research report. That report noted that the federal government employed 1.87% of the entire civilian workforce. That percentage includes postal employees, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
The Trump administration said that even government employees who stay on could still eventually lose their jobs as the president reshapes the federal government and its workforce.
A document that went out with the email noted: “the federal workforce is expected to undergo significant near-term changes.”
The federal email also noted that “the majority of federal agencies are likely to be downsized through restructurings, realignments, and reductions in force. These actions are likely to include the use of furloughs and the reclassification to at-will status for a substantial number of federal employees.”
