Roughly 75,000 federal employees have accepted President Donald Trump’s deferred resignation program, after the U.S. Office of Personnel Management offered more than two million federal civilian employees buyouts in January to leave their jobs or be forced to return to work in person.
Employees who accepted the so-called ‘fork in the road’ offer will retain all pay and benefits and be exempt from in-person work until Sept. 30, a move that’s part of a broader attempt by the Trump administration to downsize the federal government.
‘We have too many people,’ Trump told reporters Tuesday in a press briefing. ‘We have office spaces occupied by 4% — nobody showing up to work because they were told not to.’
The White House confirmed to Fox News Digital that numbers had climbed to 75,000 as of Thursday morning.
It previously said it expected 200,000 people to accept the offer.
The Trump administration’s offer faced scrutiny, and a federal judge temporarily blocked the administration’s plan from advancing amid challenges from labor union groups who voiced concerns that the law didn’t require the Trump administration to hold up its end of the deal.
However, U.S. District Judge George O’Toole of Massachusetts ruled in favor of the White House Wednesday evening, asserting the plaintiffs in the case aren’t directly impacted by the Trump administration’s offer.
They ‘allege that the directive subjects them to upstream effects including a diversion of resources to answer members’ questions about the directive, a potential loss of membership, and possible reputational harm,’ O’Toole wrote.
‘The unions do not have the required direct stake in the Fork Directive, but are challenging a policy that affects others, specifically executive branch employees,’ O’Toole wrote. ‘This is not sufficient.’
The Trump administration praised the court’s decision, and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt described it as ‘the first of many legal wins for the president.’
‘The court dissolved the injunction due to a lack of standing,’ Leavitt said in a statement to Fox News Digital. ‘This goes to show that lawfare will not ultimately prevail over the will of 77 million Americans who supported President Trump and his priorities.’
The buyout program is one of several initiatives the Trump administration has unveiled to cut down the federal workforce. On Tuesday, Trump also signed an executive order instructing the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to coordinate with federal agencies and execute massive cuts in federal workforce staffing numbers.
The order instructs DOGE and federal agencies to work together to ‘significantly’ shrink the size of the federal government and limit hiring new employees, according to a White House fact sheet on the order. Specifically, agencies must not hire more than one employee for every four that leave their federal post.
Agencies also are instructed to ‘undertake plans for large-scale reductions in force’ and evaluate ways to eliminate or combine agency functions that aren’t legally required, the fact sheet said.
Fox News’ Andrea Margolis, Jake Gibson, Jacqui Heinrich and Patrick Ward contributed to this report.
