by Sara Forden and Gregory Korte
President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s government efficiency team scored a win in court after a judge cleared the way for an unprecedented buyout offer to millions of federal employees despite a lawsuit by labor unions.
The unions don’t have legal standing to sue because they “are not directly impacted” by the buyout plan, US District Court Judge George A. O’Toole Jr. in Boston said Wednesday in a written ruling. The judge also said the unions weren’t likely to succeed on the merits of their claims.
Trump and billionaire Musk, who the president put in charge of the administration’s “efficiency” push, have faced multiple legal challenges to their plans for shrinking the federal government, including the buyout offer made Jan. 28.
“This Boston buyout ruling is the first of many legal wins for the president,” White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said. “This goes to show that lawfare will not ultimately prevail over the will of 77 million Americans who supported President Trump and his priorities.”
The unions claimed in their lawsuit that the Office of Personnel Management lacked legal authority to make the “unprecedented” offer, adding that workers were getting vague and contradictory information about their rights and “barely-veiled threats” of future firings.
“Today’s ruling is a setback in the fight for dignity and fairness for public servants,” said Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees. “But it’s not the end of that fight.” The union’s lawyers are “assessing next steps.”
Federal employees were given a little more than a week to decide whether to accept the buyout offer they got via an email titled “Fork in the Road,” which echoed a similar memo Musk, Tesla Inc.’s chief executive officer, sent to employees of Twitter before a mass layoff following his purchase of the social media platform in 2022. The message said US employees who took the offer wouldn’t be expected to continue performing their jobs and would keep their pay and benefits through September.
“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 in a statement.
In a previous ruling, the judge temporarily delayed the Feb. 6 deadline for millions of federal employees across the US to accept the offer. As of last Friday, about 65,000 employees took the buyout, which is now over as a result of the ruling.
“There is no longer any doubt: the Deferred Resignation Program was both legal and a valuable option for federal employees,” a spokesperson for the Office of Personnel Management said in a statement. “This program was carefully designed, thoroughly vetted, and provides generous benefits so federal workers can plan for their futures.”
The case is American Federation of Government Employees, AFL-CIO v. Ezell, 25-cv-10276, US District Court, District of Massachusetts.
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