About 75,000 Federal employees have accepted the Trump administration’s “deferred resignation” offer, a spokesperson for the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) confirmed to MeriTalk.
The offer allows Federal employees to resign but be paid through Sept. 30. OPM said the offer’s deadline closed on Wednesday after a Federal judge lifted a pause on the program – the original deadline for employees to accept the offer was Feb. 6.
McLaurine Pinover, the communications director at OPM, told MeriTalk that the agency was “pleased the court has rejected a desperate effort to strike down the Deferred Resignation Program.”
“As of 7:00 p.m. last night, the program is now closed,” Pinover said. “There is no longer any doubt: the Deferred Resignation Program was both legal and a valuable option for Federal employees.”
In his written opinion, U.S. District Judge George A. O’Toole Jr. said he made the decision to lift the pause because the unions lacked the legal standing to challenge the directive.
The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said in a statement that Wednesday’s ruling “is a setback in the fight for dignity and fairness for public servants.”
“It’s not the end of that fight. AFGE’s lawyers are evaluating the decision and assessing next steps,” AFGE National President Everett Kelley said. “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 added.
The Federal civilian workforce amounts to about 2.4 million people, not including military personnel and U.S. Postal Service workers. The 75,000 Feds taking the deferred resignation program amounts to about 3.1 percent of that total.
In a bid to shrink the workforce further, President Donald Trump earlier this week issued an executive order that aims to make deep cuts to the Federal government civilian workforce via “reductions in force” – more commonly known as layoffs. The order does not state a target number of people for that effort.
