By Natalia Marquez
Following a legal response by organized labor, one of Trump’s early attacks against the US federal workforce have been temporarily halted. On Thursday, February 6, Trump’s deadline to furlough millions of federal workers if they did not accept a buyout offer was paused following an injunction by a federal judge in Boston. This pause came less than 11 hours before the deadline for workers to accept the buyout offer, which 65,000 federal workers did—agreeing to leave their jobs in exchange for eight months of pay and benefits through September.
Judge George O’Toole Jr., who halted Trump’s offer of buyouts, said the administration’s plans would pause until a Monday court hearing, in which he would determine the merits of a lawsuit filed by four unions which represent federal workers. On Tuesday, February 4, nonprofit legal services organization Democracy Forward filed a legal challengeon behalf of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), AFGE Local 3707, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, (AFSCME), and the National Association of Government Employees (NAGE).
According to the legal nonprofit, the unions are “seeking 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.” Democracy Forward claims that Trump’s “Fork Directive” buyout offers are part of a larger plan to “remove career public service workers and replace them with partisan loyalists.”
Democracy Forward is also representing a coalition of unions and the think tank Economic Policy Institute in filing a lawsuit which successfully halted the Elon Musk-headed Department of Government Efficiency’s access to sensitive Treasury Department payment system information—a power grab that had prompted mass protests outside of the Treasury Department in Washington, DC.
Represented by the legal nonprofit, the American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees (AFL-CIO), the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the Communications Workers of America (CWA), and nonpartisan think tank Economic Policy Institute filed a a Motion for Temporary Restraining Order in the US District Court of the District of Columbia. This motion successfully halted DOGE’s access to sensitive federal information. These labor unions together represent over four million workers.
“The lawsuits filed by federal workers are an important initial step in a showdown over the future of the federal government,” Walter Smolarek, editor of Liberation News, told Peoples Dispatch. “Elon Musk and his DOGE team are attempting to obliterate any program that is of any benefit to working people, and leave intact only the activities that help enrich the billionaire class, like massive government spending on weapons. No one elected Elon Musk, and as the lawsuit correctly argues he has no business accessing the sensitive personal information stored in government databases. What will be decisive is whether or not the protest movement in the streets intensifies and puts pressure on the courts.”
Meanwhile, mostly Black federal health workers have been targeted through a watchlist published by the American Accountability Foundation (AAF) on January 28. AAF, which published the so-called “DEI Watchlist” as well as an earlier “DHS Watchlist” in July of 2024 targeting “America’s Most Subversive Immigration Bureaucrats,” is a member of the advisor board of the infamous Project 2025, a collection of ultra-right policy proposals from the Heritage Foundation. The “DEI Watchlist” included the names, photos and work history of 57 mostly Black federal employees.
This article originally appeared in the People’s Dispatch on February 7th, 2025
