Team Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency scored a big win on Thursday, February 13, as a federal judge ruled in favor of its downsizing program that offered federal workers a buyout in exchange for retiring. The program had been put on pause, but the lawsuit that paused it was overturned on standing grounds.
As background, the disputed initiative was called the “Fork in the Road” program. Under it, federal bureaucrats were offered eight months of pay and benefits if the chose to voluntarily resign from the federal workforce. About 3% of the non-military workforce, or 75,000 total people, chose to take the offer and resign, a relatively large workforce reduction.
The program was reportedly developed by DOGE head Elon Musk, who aims to generally slash federal waste and spending, in part by slimming down operations. Trump Administration Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, commenting on the program on the same day it got the judicial green light, said, “75,000 people accepted the buyout program. That’s going to save millions of dollars for the American taxpayers and that’s exactly what we wanted. We put a deadline on it, and the deadline was reached. 75,000 people accepted the offer.”
It was US District Judge George O’Toole Jr., a federal judge in Boston, who issued the ruling that gave DOGE the green light for the program. In his opinion, Judge O’Toole lifted the temporary restraining program put on the order and found that the federal employee unions that sued had no standing to challenge the program, as it didn’t impact them.
Making that ruling, Judge O’Toole wrote, “The plaintiffs here are not directly impacted by the directive. Instead, they allege that the directive subjects them to upstream effects including a diversion of resources to answer members’ questions about the directive, a potential loss of membership, and possible reputational harm.”
Continuing, he wrote that the unions don’t have a “direct stake” in the policy, as it doesn’t direct affect them, and thus their standing isn’t sufficient. He ruled, “The unions do not have the required direct stake in the Fork Directive, but are challenging a policy that affects others, specifically executive branch employees. This is not sufficient.”
Judge O’Toole further added, commenting on the matter of lost union dues, “Just as the Court found that the plaintiffs in Hippocratic Medicine could not spend their way into standing, neither can the plaintiffs in this case establish standing by choosing to divert resources towards “respond[ing] to tremendous uncertainty created by OPM’s actions” and away from other union priorities. (Pls.’ Mem. in Supp. of TRO 17.) Moreover, a loss of membership dues to the unions is not certain before the September 30th deadline.”
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Shortly later in his ruling, Judge O’Toole added “Second, this Court lacks subject matter jurisdiction to consider the plaintiffs’ pleaded claims.” He said that is the case. because in a similar case, “the plaintiff-unions’ claims fell within the Federal Service Labor-Management Relations Statute’s (“FSL-MRS”) scheme and therefore the district court lacked jurisdiction to hear the case.”
Watch Ms. Leavitt discuss the Fork in the Road program here: