Federal Worker Unions File Lawsuit to Block Trump Buyout Program

The U.S. Capitol building view from the Washington Monument in Washington on Jan. 27, 2025. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

Multiple federal government employee unions filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration’s plan to offer buyouts to federal workers.

The American Federation of Government Employees and two other unions claim the buyout offer is “arbitrary and capricious in numerous respects” and violates federal law, according to a complaint filed on Tuesday.

The White House last week offered 2 million civilian full-time federal workers an opportunity to stop working this week and receive pay and benefits through Sept. 30 as President Donald Trump seeks to slash the size of the government. The deadline to take the offer is Thursday.

But the unions argued that the buyout program “fails to consider possible adverse consequences of the directive provided to millions of federal employees to the continuing functioning of government” and allegedly “offers conflicting information about employees’ rights and obligations if they accept the government’s offer.”

The move, the groups said, goes against longstanding practices and rules for federal workers, ignores history and practices on workforce reduction, sets a deadline that is too short, and “is pretext for removing and replacing government workers on an ideological basis.”

“In issuing the directive across the government barely a week after the new administration was sworn in, [Office of Personnel Management] did not conduct any analysis of which agencies were likely to experience high levels of resignations, the optimal number of resignations, or where staffing was already woefully insufficient such that soliciting resignations would be incontrovertibly harmful to government operations,” attorneys for the labor unions also wrote in their complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

The lawsuit asks a federal judge to rule that the deferred resignation program is not valid and to order the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which crafted the directive, to come up with an alternative. The plaintiffs also want the office to provide federal workers with 60 days to consider a resignation offer, according to the lawsuit.

Last week, OPM sent a memo that the buyouts were being offered under a new “deferred resignation” initiative.

“This email is being sent to more than TWO MILLION federal employees,” Katie Miller, a member of the U.S. DOGE Service, wrote in a post on social media platform X on Jan. 28, in which she shared a report by Axios indicating that the Trump administration will offer to pay eligible federal workers through the end of September, provided that they hand in their resignation by Feb. 6.

Before the lawsuit was submitted, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), which has 800,000 members, called on federal workers to reject the OPM offer.

“There is not yet any evidence the administration can or will uphold its end of the bargain, that Congress will go along with this unilateral massive restructuring, or that appropriated funds can be used this way, among other issues that have been raised,” AFGE said in an email to its members on Monday.

But despite the legal challenge, a U.S. official told The Epoch Times that more than 20,000 federal workers will take the offer before the Thursday deadline.

“On background, I can tell you that the 20,000 number isn’t current. The number of deferred resignations is rapidly growing, and we’re expecting the largest spike to come 24 to 48 hours before the deadline,” the official told The Epoch Times on Tuesday, responding to the Axios report.