Judge pauses Musk plan for mass cull of US govt workers

A judge on Thursday suspended a scheme masterminded by billionaire Elon Musk to slash the size of the US government by encouraging federal workers to quit through a mass buyout.

The federal judge in Massachusetts ordered a temporary injunction on the plan's deadline — midnight Thursday — given by Musk for the country's more than two million government employees. The offer was to quit with eight months' pay or risk being fired in future culls.

The deadline is now extended to Monday, when US District Judge George O'Toole will hold a hearing on the merits of the case brought by labor unions, US media reported.

Musk, the world's richest person and President Donald Trump's biggest donor, is in charge of a free-ranging entity called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) that aims to gut the government.

According to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, more than 40,000 staff have so far accepted the buyout deal — a relatively small number.

Unions representing some 800,000 civil servants and Democratic members of Congress are resisting the scheme and have challenged the legality of threats to fire civil servants.

But the broader budget cutting campaign — fanned by anti-government-worker invective from Trump and his aides — has already severely disrupted the huge departments and agencies that for decades have run everything from education to national intelligence.

USAID, the government's humanitarian aid agency, has been crippled, with foreign-based staff ordered home and the organization's programs lambasted daily — and often inaccurately — as wasteful by the White House and right-wing media.

A union official confirmed reports that the agency's global workforce would be slashed from over 10,000 to just under 300.

"Eventually we will have to stop food distribution, because we won't have bodies in the field to make sure the food is actually being distributed," Randy Chester, vice president of the American Foreign Service Association, told reporters.

Robin Thurston, of Democracy Forward, which has sued the Trump administration over the mass layoffs at USAID, slammed the "unlawful seizure of this agency by the Trump-Vance administration, in a plain violation of basic constitutional principles about separation of power."

Trump has also repeatedly said he wants to shut down the Department of Education. The inducements to resign have further been extended to the CIA.

An official with the agency that manages government property said the real estate portfolio, barring Department of Defense buildings, should be cut by "at least 50 percent."

Leavitt told reporters that federal workers should "accept the very generous offer" of a deferred resignation.

She said "competent" replacements would be found for those who "want to rip the American people off."

Among the controversies swirling around the Musk plan is how much access the South African-born tycoon is getting to secret government data, including the Treasury's entire payment system.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Bloomberg TV on Thursday that there was "a lot of misinformation" and that access to such data was only given to two Treasury employees who are working with Musk.

Bessent said those employees had "read-only" access, meaning they couldn't change the data.

One of those two resigned, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday, after it emerged that he had advocated racism and eugenics on social media.

'Chill' or big 'con'?

Questions are rife over the buyout, including over whether Trump has the legal right to make the offer and whether the conditions will be honored.

The plan was first announced in an e-mail sent across most of the vast federal government and titled "Fork in the road" — the same phrasing as the note Musk sent to employees at Twitter when he bought the social media platform in 2022 and renamed it X.

Musk says the paid departures are a chance to "take the vacation you always wanted, or just watch movies and chill, while receiving your full government pay and benefits."

Unions warn that without Congress signing off on the use of federally budgeted money, the agreements may be worthless.

"Federal employees shouldn't be misled by slick talk from unelected billionaires and their lackeys," said Everett Kelley, president of the large American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE).

An employee in the US Office of Personnel Management, where Musk has put his own staff in key positions, said the plan was to encourage resignations through "panic."

"We're trying to instill a panic so that people just walk out the door and leave government in a crippled state, which is partly their objective," the employee told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.