In an early victory for government workers, a federal judge has granted a limited temporary restraining order preventing the Trump administration from implementing its deferred resignation program and suspending the Feb. 6 midnight deadline for federal employees to respond. The judge has set a Monday hearing to hear further arguments.
“We are pleased the court temporarily paused this deadline while arguments are heard about the legality of the deferred resignation program. We continue to believe this program violates the law, and we will continue to aggressively defend our members’ rights,” AFGE President Everett Kelley said.
The action was in response to a legal challenge filed Feb. 5 by AFGE, AFGE Local 3707, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, (AFSCME), and the National Association of Government Employees (NAGE) represented by Democracy Forward.
The group sought a Temporary Restraining Order (“TRO”) to halt the Trump-Vance administration’s “Fork Directive” Feb. 6 deadline and 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.
The complaint alleges the “Fork Directive” violates the federal Administrative Procedure Act, which governs how federal agencies create and enforce regulations, and for exceeding statutory authority under the Antideficiency Act, which prohibits federal agencies from spending federal funds in advance or in excess of an appropriation.
The complaint and TRO were filed in Federal District Court in Massachusetts. The group is represented by Democracy Forward.
The “Fork Directive” is the latest attempt by the Trump-Vance administration to implement Project 2025’s dangerous plans to remove career public service workers and replace them with partisan loyalists.
The “Fork Directive” amounts to 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.
Even so, as employees face threats from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) that failure to resign may result in being fired without compensation, workers are being offered a package that violates the law.
For example, it is unclear how the government can promise to pay workers for a deferred resignation when the funds to do so have not been appropriated. Despite the directive’s assertions that workers would be free to accept other jobs after resigning, longstanding federal ethics regulations place numerous restrictions on the outside employment opportunities that a current federal worker can accept.
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