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Elon Musk’s initial email to millions of civil servants began with an suspicious offer (Click Here to Resign) from a suspicious address ([email protected]) that none of these workers had seen before. On Thursday, only hours after Massachusetts District Judge George O’Toole dissolved the temporary injunction that he’d entered the week before, temporarily blocking the deferred resignation program, they received another email saying that the offer was “closed.”
The lawsuit, brought by three federal worker unions, argued that Musk’s offer violated the Administrative Procedure Act and that the Office of Personnel Management had exceeded its authority in proposing to write checks that Congress had not yet accounted for, in violation of the Constitution’s appropriations clause.
Judge O’Toole entertained those weighty arguments in a hearing on Monday, but chose instead to rest his ruling on a pair of technicalities, finding that the unions lacked standing and that his court lacked subject-matter jurisdiction. More specifically, he found that the dispute fell within the Federal Service Labor-Management Relations statute, which requires plaintiffs to exhaust administrative remedies before showing up to federal court. The American Federation of Government Employees issued a statement suggesting it was contemplating an appeal, and noted that the decision did not address the program’s lawfulness.
It seems perversely ironic to dismiss the unions’ claims on behalf of federal workers for failing to strictly adhere to an act of Congress when the nature of their claims is that the OPM, under Musk, has completely disposed of federal formalities like rules, statutes, and laws to get where they’re going. And in response to the exigency created by Musk in the name of breakneck efficiency, unions representing hundreds of thousands of affected workers must continue to be constrained by bureaucratic norms. This is Calvinball, all-pro edition.
To state the obvious, the court would have created a daunting task for itself if it had ruled for the unions, inasmuch as so many horses—approximately 75,000 of them, at last and possibly final count—are already halfway out of the barn, merely by virtue of having clicked Resign in response to Musk’s “Fork in the Road” email. The Silicon Valley “move fast and break things” ethos gave Musk a distinct advantage and initiative over a court that might be willing to fix things.
Only hours after the injunction was dissolved, at around 7:30 p.m., Musk’s team sent out a short, blunt email from the [email protected] account:
The Deferred Resignation Program is now closed. Any resignations received after 7:20pmET, February 12, 2025 will not be accepted.
The email might as well have been sent by Nelson Muntz: Ha ha. You missed your deadline. And by only 10 minutes!
The petty contempt wasn’t lost on federal workers, many of whom have been gathering at the r/fednews subreddit, one characterizing this new moment as “Phase 2: More Pain.” Another commenter noted that it’s “all about punishment for them,” a sentiment that was widely shared.
One worker I spoke with, who prefers to remain anonymous for obvious enough reasons, tells me he was waiting on the court to rule and was planning to accept the offer if the judge let it go through. Opening his work email Wednesday night, he saw the news of Judge O’Toole’s ruling at the same time he found out the offer was off the table.
I asked why he had waited if he intended to take the offer, and his answer made sense: “Because if the judge ruled against Musk’s program, I would have put a target on my back by letting my supervisor know that I didn’t want to be here. I was trying to avoid a retaliation scenario. And I wasn’t the only one—two colleagues in my small department were in the same boat, waiting to see what the judge would do.”
Musk’s “Fork is Closed” email also makes no mention of the memo that acting OPM Director Charles Ezell sent to agency heads on Tuesday, instructing them to “provide supplemental notice of additional, agency-specific disclosures required by the [Older Workers Benefit Protection Act],” which would require the government to give workers over the age of 40 at least 45 days to consider the deferred resignation program. Ezell’s memo even concedes the legitimate basis for adhering to the law: “This is so an employee has enough information regarding the program to allow the employee to make an informed choice whether to sign a waiver.”
It’s still unclear, though: Is Ezell’s memo acknowledging the rights of over-40 workers to have additional time to accept the offer still valid, or has the OWBPA joined the growing group of laws Musk has decided are of no matter in his ostensibly relentless pursuit of efficiency? It may be telling that the link to Ezell’s memo, which had been hosted on a .gov page, now resolves to a “Page not found” message.
Whether by sloppiness or malice, the hallmark of Musk’s deferred resignation program has been disorienting confusion for workers considering the offer, with the OPM issuing multiple clarifications and sweeteners and changes in a very short—it’s been less than two weeks!—time frame. Even now, after the court seemingly put the emergency to bed, uncertainty will continue to loom for the workers who agreed to accept money through September that Congress has yet to appropriate, in exchange for not working, rendering them perhaps vulnerable to unforecastable political winds.
Meanwhile, just after the court ruled against the unions and just as Musk was closing down the Fork, CNN reported that scores of firings had commenced at the Department of Education and Small Business Administration. The notices that went out to these employees dripped with the same contempt: “The Agency finds, based on your performance, that you have not demonstrated that your further employment at the Agency would be in the public interest.”
One federal worker I spoke with questioned the necessity of chaos and malice: “Given that there’s a 5 percent yearly turnover in the federal workforce, why not just reduce the workforce naturally by declining to backfill?” He then answered his own question: “It’s as if they only wanted to scare, hurt, and demoralize us.”
