Midnight tonight is the deadline for President Trump’s buyout offer for federal employees, but a federal judge has blocked the deadline and delayed until at least Monday, when he will have a hearing on the issue.

All it means is that, for now, federal employees have a few more days to accept the buyout.

Here’s more from ABC News:

A federal judge has temporarily blocked the Trump administration and DOGE head Elon Musk from implementing their “Fork in the Road” federal employee buyout offer until at least Monday afternoon.

U.S. District Judge George O’Toole Jr. set a Monday afternoon hearing to consider blocking the buyout offer further.

“I enjoined the defendants from taking any action to implement the so-called ‘Fork Directive’ pending the completion of briefing and oral argument on the issues,” said O’Toole. “I believe that’s as far as I want to go today.”

The judge described the brief hearing as a “table setting session” just to schedule arguments for Monday afternoon. He did not say anything about the merits of the dispute over the buyout.

Lawyers for the Department of Justice said they would notify every federal employee who is subject to the buyout.

More than two million federal employees had faced a midnight Thursday deadline to accept the Trump administration’s “deferred resignation” offer as O’Toole considered an eleventh-hour request to block the buyout from moving forward.

The judge set the Thursday afternoon hearing to consider a request by three federal unions to issue a temporary restraining order that would suspend Thursday’s deadline for the buyout and require the Office of Personnel Management to provide a legal basis for the unprecedented offer, which offered to continue to pay federal employees through Sept. 30, 2025, if they resigned by Thursday at 11:59 p.m.

The judge’s ruling’s comes as at least 40,000 federal workers — roughly 2% of the civilian federal workforce — have already accepted the deferred resignation offer to leave the federal government since last week, ABC News has reported.

I heard on Fox News the number of employees who accepted the buyout was closer to 60,000 people. Also this judge is a Clinton appointee, so my guess is he’ll nix the buyout and Trump will have to appeal it.

 
UPDATE: News Nation reporter Libbey Dean writes:

An administration official tells @KellieMeyerNews more than 60k federal workers have now accepted buyout offer.

A federal judge has extended the deadline and @PressSec says they are “grateful to the Judge for extending the deadline so more federal workers who refuse to show up to the office can take the Administration up on this very generous, once-in-a-lifetime offer.”