U.S. District Judge George A. O’Toole Jr. dissolved his restraining order blocking the "deferred resignations" program after finding the plaintiffs lacked legal standing.

Summary

A federal judge in Boston has lifted a temporary freeze on the Trump administration’s “fork in the road” program, which offers mass buyouts to millions of federal workers.

U.S. District Judge George A. O’Toole Jr. ruled that labor unions challenging the plan lacked legal standing, as they were not directly impacted.

The unions argued the program could harm their membership and reputation, but the judge found these concerns insufficient.

With the ruling, the administration’s unprecedented resignation incentive can now proceed.

  • Nougat@fedia.io
    1·
    4 hours ago

    Here’s the ruling.

    My assessment was accurate. AFGE (the union) does not have standing because AFGE the organization is not “directly impacted”:

    Standing requires the plaintiffs to be more than “mere bystander[s]” and instead requires a “personal stake in the dispute.” … The plaintiffs here are not directly impacted by the directive.

    Furthermore, there is a second reason the judge states for why the injuction was lifted:

    Second, this Court lacks subject matter jurisdiction to consider the plaintiffs’ pleaded claims.

    This one gets a little more complicated, but in summary, there is a procedure for how a federal employees union is supposed to navigate disputes. There are two parts to this.

    Part one is that AFGE must exhaust all “administrative” measures first. Part two is whether “the litigant’s claims are of the type Congress intended to be reviewed within [the] statutory structure.”

    In so deciding, the court walked through the two-part Thunder Basin framework. Id. (“Under that framework, Congress intended that a litigant proceed exclusively through a statutory scheme . . . when (i) such intent is fairly discernible in the statutory scheme, and (ii) the litigant’s claims are of the type Congress intended to be reviewed within [the] statutory structure.” … According to this complex scheme, disputes must first be administratively exhausted before the employing agency and the relevant administrative review board and any further challenges are properly heard in a court of appeals.

    According to this ruling, the first step (exhausting administrative measures) is satisfied. The second, however, is not:

    Aggrieved employees can bring claims through the administrative process. That the unions themselves may be foreclosed from this administrative process does not mean that adequate judicial review is lacking.

    Now - this is not all bad news. This is a lifting of the injunction, not a dismissal of the case, which I honestly would have expected from a “plaintiffs do not have standing” ruling. To me, this signals that the judge is leaving space for AFGE to bring qualified plaintiffs to the case in order for it to go forward, and I expect they will do that. I also expect that Defendant will move for dismissal on the basis of this ruling.