More than 65,000 federal employees have taken the Trump administration‘s “Fork in the Road” deferred resignation offer, and that number continues to grow.
A White House official confirmed the figure to the Washington Examiner as the White House hopes to reach its target of having between 5% and 10% of the federal workforce accept the offers. There are about 2 million federal employees, meaning the target is to have between 100,000 and 200,000 accept the offer.
Three major unions — the American Federation of Government Employees, the National Association of Government Employees, and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees — filed a lawsuit challenging the directive and won a delay of the program earlier this week. However, the source said that development has the ironic side effect of giving workers more time to opt into the proposal their unions are fighting.
The “Fork in the Road” offer, issued by the Office of Personnel Management, gave federal workers until midnight Thursday to resign in exchange for continued pay through Sept. 30. That deadline has now been extended until at least Monday. The plan, modeled after Department of Government Efficiency head Elon Musk’s restructuring of X, has sparked fierce opposition from federal employee unions.
“We 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,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told the Washington Examiner on Friday.
The effort is designed to trim the federal workforce, particularly hybrid or remote workers who do not want to return to the office. Democrats and unions have worked to undermine the effort, arguing that it’s illegal and that the Trump administration may not honor its commitment of eight months of paid leave for those who opt in.
Trump’s OPM has countered with follow-up emails offering more information and a contract template workers can fill out that puts the agreement in writing. That appears to be paying some dividends, as the number of opt-ins ballooned from 20,000 on Tuesday to at least 65,000 as of Friday morning.
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An FAQ section on the OPM website says employees will not have to work during the deferred resignation period and that they can even accept a new job and be paid for both through the end of September.
“We encourage you to find a job in the private sector as soon as you would like to do so,” it says. “The way to greater American prosperity is encouraging people to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector.”